Whats mines mine, p.3
WHAT’S MINE’S MINE, page 3
They hastened to the road. The gig came up. Valentine threw the reins to his companion, jumped out, embraced his sisters, and seemed glad to see them. Had he met them after a like interval at home, he would have given them a cooler greeting; but he had travelled so many miles that they seemed not to have met for quite a long time.
“My friend, Mr. Sercombe,” he said, jerking his head toward the gig.
Mr. Sercombe raised his POT-LID — the last fashion in head-gear — and acquaintance was made.
“We’ll drive on, Sercombe,” said Valentine, jumping up. “You see, Chris, we’re half dead with hunger! Do you think we shall find anything to eat?”
“Judging by what we left at breakfast,” replied Christina, “I should say you will find enough for — one of you; but you had better go and see.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE SHOP IN THE VILLAGE.
Two or three days have passed. The sun had been set for an hour, and the night is already rather dark notwithstanding the long twilight of these northern regions, for a blanket of vapour has gathered over the heaven, and a few stray drops have begun to fall from it. A thin wind now and then wakes, and gives a feeble puff, but seems immediately to change its mind and resolve not to blow, but let the rain come down. A drearier-looking spot for human abode it would be difficult to imagine, except it were as much of the sandy Sahara, or of the ashy, sage-covered waste of western America. A muddy road wound through huts of turf — among them one or two of clay, and one or two of stone, which were more like cottages. Hardly one had a window two feet square, and many of their windows had no glass. In almost all of them the only chimney was little more than a hole in the middle of the thatch. This rendered the absence of glass in the windows not so objectionable; for, left without ordered path to its outlet, the smoke preferred a circuitous route, and lingered by the way, filling the air. Peat-smoke, however, is both wholesome and pleasant, nor was there mingled with it any disagreeable smell of cooking. Outside were no lamps; the road was unlighted save by the few rays that here and there crept from a window, casting a doubtful glimmer on the mire.
One of the better cottages sent out a little better light, though only from a tallow candle, through the open upper half of a door horizontally divided in two. Except by that same half-door, indeed, little light could enter the place, for its one window was filled with all sorts of little things for sale. Small and inconvenient for the humblest commerce, this was not merely the best, it was the only shop in the hamlet.
There were two persons in it, one before and one behind the counter.
The latter was a young woman, the former a man.
He was leaning over the counter — whether from weariness, listlessness, or interest in his talk with the girl behind, it would not have been easy, in the dim light and deep shadow, to say. He seemed quite at home, yet the young woman treated him with a marked, though unembarrassed respect. The candle stood to one side of them upon the counter, making a ghastly halo in the damp air; and in the light puff that occasionally came in at the door, casting the shadow of one of a pair of scales, now on this now on that of the two faces. The young woman was tall and dark, with a large forehead: — so much could be seen; but the sweetness of her mouth, the blueness of her eyes, the extreme darkness of her hair, were not to be distinguished. The man also was dark. His coat was of some rough brown material, probably dyed and woven in the village, and his kilt of tartan. They were more than well worn — looked even in that poor light a little shabby. On his head was the highland bonnet called a glengarry. His profile was remarkable — hardly less than grand, with a certain aquiline expression, although the nose was not roman. His eyes appeared very dark, but in the daylight were greenish hazel. Usually he talked with the girl in Gaelic, but was now speaking English, a far purer English than that of most English people, though with something of the character of book-English as distinguished from conversation-English, and a very perceptible accent.
“And when was it you heard from Lachlan, Annie?” he asked.
After a moment’s pause, during which she had been putting away things in a drawer of the counter — not so big as many a kitchen dresser —
“Last Thursday it was, sir,” answered the girl. “You know we hear every month, sometimes oftener.”
“Yes; I know that. — I hope the dear fellow is well?”
“He is quite well and of good hope. He says he will soon come and see us now.”
“And take you away, Annie?”
“Well, sir,” returned Annie, after a moment’s hesitation, “he does not SAY so!”
“If he did not mean it, he would be a rascal, and I should have to kill him. But my life on Lachlan’s honesty!”
“Thank you, sir. He would lay down his for you.”
“Not if you said to him, DON’T!-eh, Annie?”
“But he would, Macruadh!” returned the young woman, almost angrily.
“Are not you his chief?”
“Ah, that is all over now, my girl! There are no chiefs, and no clans any more! The chiefs that need not, yet sell their land like Esau for a mess of pottage — and their brothers with it! And the Sasunnach who buys it, claims rights over them that never grew on the land or were hid in its caves! Thank God, the poor man is not their slave, but he is the worse off, for they will not let him eat, and he has nowhere to go. My heart is like to break for my people. Sometimes I feel as if I would gladly die.”
“Oh, sir! don’t say that!” expostulated the young woman, and her voice trembled. “Every heart in Glenruadh is glad when it goes well with the Macruadh.”
“Yes, yes; I know you all love my father’s son and my uncle’s nephew; but how can it go well with the Macruadh when it goes ill with his clan? There is no way now for a chief to be the father of his people; we are all poor together! My uncle — God rest his soul! — they managed it so, I suppose, as to persuade him there was no help for it! Well, a man must be an honest man, even if there be no way but ruin! God knows, as we’ve all heard my father say a hundred times from the pulpit, there’s no ruin but dishonesty! For poverty and hard work, he’s a poor creature would crouch for those!”
“He who well goes down hill, holds his head up!” said Annie, and a pause followed.
“There are strangers at the New House, we hear,” she said.
“From a distance I saw some young ladies, and one or two men. I don’t desire to see more of them. God forbid I should wish them any manner of harm! but — I hardly understand myself — I don’t like to see them there. I am afraid it is pride. They are rich, I hear, so we shall not be troubled with attention from them; they will look down upon us.”
“Look down on the Macruadh!” exclaimed Annie, as if she could not believe her ears.
“Not that I should heed that!” he went on. “A cock on the barn-ridge looks down on you, and you don’t feel offended! What I do dread is looking down on them. There is something in me that can hate, Annie, and I fear it. There is something about the land — I don’t care about money, but I feel like a miser about the land! — I don’t mean ANY land; I shouldn’t care to buy land unless it had once been ours; but what came down to me from my own people — with my own people upon it — I would rather turn the spigot of the molten gold and let it run down the abyss, than a rood of that slip from me! I feel it even a disgrace to have lost what of it I never had!”
“Indeed, Macruadh,” said Annie, “it’s a hard time! There is no money in the country! And fast the people are going after Lachlan!”
“I shall miss you, Annie!”
“You are very kind to us all, sir.”
“Are you not all my own! And you have to take care of for Lachlan’s sake besides. He left you solemnly to my charge — as if that had been necessary, the foolish fellow, when we are foster-brothers!”
Again came a pause.
“Not a gentleman-farmer left from one end of the strath to the other!” said the chief at length. “When Ian is at home, we feel just like two old turkey-cocks left alone in the yard!”
“Say two golden eagles, sir, on the cliff of the rock.”
“Don’t compare us to the eagle, Annie. I do not love the bird. He is very proud and greedy and cruel, and never will know the hand that tames him. He is the bird of the monarch or the earl, not the bird of the father of his people. But he is beautiful, and I do not kill him.”
“They shot another, the female bird, last week! All the birds are going! Soon there will be nothing but the great sheep and the little grouse. The capercailzie’s gone, and the ptarmigan’s gone! — Well, there’s a world beyond!”
“Where the birds go, Annie? — Well, it may be! But the ptarmigan’s not gone yet, though there are not many; and for the capercailzie — only who that loves them will be here to see! — But do you really think there is a heaven for all God’s creatures, Annie? Ian does.”
“I don’t know what I said to make you think so, sir! When the heart aches the tongue mistakes. But how is my lady, your mother?”
“Pretty well, thank you — wonderfully cheerful. It is time I went home to her. Lachlan would think I was playing him false, and making love to you on my own account!”
“No fear! He would know better than that! He would know too, if she was not belonging to Lachlan, her father’s daughter would not let her chief humble himself.”
“You’re one of the old sort, Annie! Good night. Mind you tell Lachlan I never miss a chance of looking in to see how you are getting on.”
“I will. Good night, Macruadh.”
They shook hands over the counter, and the young chief took his departure.
As he stood up, he showed a fine-made, powerful frame, over six feet in height, and perfectly poised. With a great easy stride he swept silently out of the shop; nor from gait any more than look would one have thought he had been all day at work on the remnant of property he could call his own.
To a cit it would have seemed strange that one sprung from innumerable patriarchal ancestors holding the land of the country, should talk so familiarly with a girl in a miserable little shop in a most miserable hamlet; it would have seemed stranger yet that such a one should toil at the labour the soul of a cit despises; but stranger than both it would seem to him, if he saw how such a man is tempted to look down upon HIM.
If less CLEVERNESS is required for country affairs, they leave the more room for thinking. There are great and small in every class; here and there is a ploughman that understands Burns, here and there a large-minded shopkeeper, here and there perhaps an unselfish duke. Doubtless most of the youth’s ancestors would likewise have held such labour unworthy of a gentleman, and would have preferred driving to their hills a herd of lowland cattle; but this, the last Macruadh, had now and then a peep into the kingdom of heaven.
CHAPTER V.
THE CHIEF.
The Macruadh strode into the dark, and down the village, wasting no time in picking his way — thence into the yet deeper dark of the moorland hills. The rain was beginning to come down in earnest, but he did not heed it; he was thoroughbred, and feared no element. An umbrella was to him a ludicrous thing: how could a little rain — as he would have called it had it come down in torrents — hurt any one!
The Macruadh, as the few who yet held by the sore-frayed, fast-vanishing skirt of clanship, called him, was the son of the last minister of the parish-a godly man, who lived that which he could ill explain, and was immeasurably better than those parts of his creed which, from a sense of duty, he pushed to the front. For he held devoutly by the root of which he spoke too little, and it supplied much sap to his life and teaching — out of the pulpit. He was a genial, friendly, and by nature even merry man, always ready to share what he had, and making no show of having what he had not, either in wisdom, knowledge, or earthly goods. His father and brother had been owners of the property and chiefs of the clan, much beloved by the poor of it, and not a little misunderstood by most of the more nourishing. For a great hunger after larger means, the ambition of the mammon-ruled world, had arisen in the land, and with it a rage for emigration. The uncle of the present Macruadh did all he could to keep his people at home, lived on a couple of hundreds a year himself, and let many of his farms to his gentlemen-tacksmen, as they were called, at lower rents; but it was unavailing; one after another departed, until his land lay in a measure waste, and he grew very poor, mourning far more over his clan and his country than his poverty. In more prosperous times he had scraped together a little money, meaning it, if he could but avoid spending it in his old age, for his brother, who must soon succeed him; for he was himself a bachelor — the result of a romantic attachment and sorrow in his youth; but he lent it to a company which failed, and so lost it. At length he believed himself compelled, for the good of his people, to part with all but a mere remnant of the property. From the man to whom he sold it, Mr. Peregrine Palmer bought it for twice the money, and had still a good bargain. But the hopes of the laird were disappointed: in the sheep it fed, and the grouse it might be brought to breed, lay all its value in the market; there was no increase in the demand for labour; and more and more of the peasantry emigrated, or were driven to other parts of the country. Such was the present treatment of the land, causing human life to ebb from it, and working directly counter to the creative God.
The laird retired to the humble cottage of his brother the pastor, just married rather late in life — where every comfort love could give waited for him; but the thought that he could have done better for his people by retaining the land soon wore him out; and having made a certain disposition of the purchase-money, he died.
What remained of the property came to the minister. As for the chieftainship, that had almost died before the chief; but, reviving by union with the reverence felt for the minister, it took thereafter a higher form. When the minister died, the idea of it transmitted to his son was of a peculiarly sacred character; while in the eyes of the people, the authority of the chief and the influence of the minister seemed to meet reborn in Alister notwithstanding his youth. In himself he was much beloved, and in love the blessed rule, blessed where understood, holds, that to him that hath shall be given, he only who has being fit to receive. The love the people bore to his father, both pastor and chief, crowned head and heart of Alister. Scarce man or woman of the poor remnant of the clan did not love the young Macruadh.
On his side was true response. With a renewed and renovating conscience, and a vivid sense that all things had to be made new, he possessed an old strong heart, clinging first to his father and mother, and then to the shadow even of any good thing that had come floating down the ages. Call it a dream, a wild ideal, a foolish fancy — call it what you please, he was filled with the notion of doing something in his own person and family, having the remnant of the clan for the nucleus of his endeavour, to restore to a vital reality, let it be of smallest extent, that most ancient of governments, the patriarchal, which, all around, had rotted into the feudal, in its turn rapidly disintegrating into the mere dust and ashes of the kingdom of the dead, over which Mammon reigns supreme. There may have been youthful presumption and some folly in the notion, but it sprang neither from presumption nor folly, but from simple humanity, and his sense of the responsibility he neither could nor would avoid, as the person upon whom had devolved the headship, however shadowy, of a house, ruinous indeed, but not yet razed.
The castle on the ridge stood the symbol of the family condition. It had, however, been a ruin much longer than any one alive could remember. Alister’s uncle had lived in a house on the spot where Mr. Peregrine Palmer’s now stood; the man who bought it had pulled it down to build that which Mr. Palmer had since enlarged. It was but a humble affair — a great cottage in stone, much in the style of that in which the young chief now lived — only six times the size, with the one feature indispensable to the notion of a chief’s residence, a large hall. Some would say it was but a huge kitchen; but it was the sacred place of the house, in which served the angel of hospitality. THERE was always plenty to eat and drink for any comer, whether he had “claim” or not: the question of claim where was need, was not thought of. When the old house had to make room for the new, the staves of the last of its half-pipes of claret, one of which used always to stand on tap amidst the peat-smoke, yielded its final ministration to humanity by serving to cook a few meals for mason and carpenter.
The property of Clanruadh, for it was regarded as clan-property BECAUSE belonging to the chief, stretched in old time away out of sight in all directions — nobody, in several, could tell exactly how far, for the undrawn boundary lines lay in regions of mist and cloud, in regions stony, rocky, desert, to which a red deer, not to say a stray sheep, rarely ascended. At one time it took in a portion at least of every hill to be seen from the spot where stood the ruin. The chief had now but a small farm, consisting of some fair soil on the slope of a hill, and some very good in the valley on both sides of the burn; with a hill-pasture that was not worth measuring in acres, for it abounded in rocks, and was prolific in heather and ling, with patches of coarse grass here and there, and some extent of good high-valley grass, to which the small black cattle and black-faced sheep were driven in summer. Beyond periodical burnings of the heather, this uplifted portion received no attention save from the mist, the snow, the rain, the sun, and the sweet air. A few grouse and black game bred on it, and many mountain-hares, with martens, wild cats, and other VERMIN. But so tender of life was the Macruadh that, though he did not spare these last, he did not like killing even a fox or a hooded crow, and never shot a bird for sport, or would let another shoot one, though the poorest would now and then beg a bird or two from him, sure of having their request. It seemed to him as if the creatures were almost a part of his clan, of which also he had to take care against a greedy world. But as the deer and the birds ranged where they would, it was not much he could do for them — as little almost as for the men and women that had gone over the sea, and were lost to their country in Canada.
