IV
The strange things that befall vagabonds on their return! The Laird of Kinnaird found himself a rich man on his arrival in Stirlingshire. Coal had been discovered on his properties.
A Scots laird and a travelled gentleman riding about his property on that largest horse ever seen in Scotland, marrying again and happily, and bringing up a family. He must have often wondered what became of all the great folk to whom he had once been Yagoube the counsellor. Ras Michael,—what of him? Did he ever know that the old man fought his way back to power, and died still holding the kingdom in his hand? And Ayto Consu, the young prince with whom he had sworn eternal friendship in the Abyssinian phrase—“by the heart of an elephant”? And Ozoro Esther whom he had last seen in the forest going to Jerusalem to pray for Ras Michael, taken from her by the troops of Begemder?
His story, when he came to tell it, was but half believed. The fierce, magnificent, passionate revelation offended the eighteenth century mind. What had a century of laces, gallantry and candles, a century trying to live by something known as “reason,” to do with this kingdom of the old, dark deities? The offence to the spirit of the age presently bred a spirit of denial. “Pshaw,” said the bewigged gentleman, “but does the dog think to fool us all with his Abyssinian folderol?” Even wise old Johnson took sides against “the Abyssinian.” It was “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia” against the reality.
The episode of the repast of living flesh became a thing of derision. Lord This refused to believe it; Lady That shuddered prettily, the coffee house wits wrote mocking poetry.
“Nor have I been where men, (what loss, alas!)
Kill half a cow, and turn the rest to grass.”
sang that dull rhymester Peter Pindar, in a tedious epistle to Bruce full of a stay-at-home’s easy jocosity. Bruce’s one official honour was a presentation to the king; all other possible glories sank from view in a rising tide of offended disbelief.
A lesser man, a man less able to see life as a whole, would have borne the world a sour grudge. Not so the Laird of Kinnaird. He lived out his years in good temper and unshaken composure. But in his later portraits there is a look which tells the whole story of his attitude to the polite world of disbelievers; the words can almost be heard—words not said angrily or sneeringly, but with well-founded and humorous conviction—“what incredible fools!”