THE STANDARD BEARER

BOOKS BY S. R. CROCKETT.

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Uniform edition. Each, 12 mo. Cloth, $1.50.

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Lads’ Love.

Illustrated.

In this fresh and charming story, which in some respects recalls “The Lilac Sunbonnet,” Mr. Crockett returns to Galloway and pictures the humor and pathos of the life which he knows so well.

Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City.

His Progress and Adventures.

“A masterpiece which Mark Twain himself has never rivaled.... If ever there was an ideal character in fiction it is this heroic ragamuffin.”—London Daily Chronicle.

“In no one of his books does Mr. Crockett give us a brighter or more graphic picture of contemporary Scotch life than in ‘Cleg Kelly.’ It is one of the great books.”—Boston Advertiser.

Bog-Myrtle and Peat.

“Here are idyls, epics, dramas of human life written in words that thrill and burn.... All are set down in words that are fit, chaste, and noble. Each is a poem that has the immortal flavor.”—Boston Courier.

The Lilac Sunbonnet.

“A love story pure and simple—one of the old-fashioned, wholesome, sunshiny kind, with a pure-minded, sound-hearted hero, and a heroine who is merely a good and beautiful woman; and if any other love story half so sweet has been written this year it has escaped our notice.”—New York Times.

New York: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

THE STANDARD BEARER

BY
S. R. CROCKETT
AUTHOR OF
THE LILAC SUNBONNET, BOG-MYRTLE AND PEAT,
CLEG KELLY, LADS’ LOVE, THE RAIDERS, ETC.

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1898
Copyright, 1897, 1898,
By S. R. CROCKETT.
GRATEFULLY AND RESPECTFULLY
I DEDICATE
TO THE GOOD AND KINDLY FOLK
OF MY NATIVE PARISH OF BALMAGHIE
THIS RENDERING OF
STRANGE HAPPENINGS AMONG THEIR FOREBEARS,
OF WHICH THEY HAVE
NOT YET QUITE LOST THE MEMORY.

THE FOREWORD.

A book iron-grey and chill is this that I have written, the tale of times when the passions of men were still working like a yeasty sea after the storms of the Great Killing. If these pages should chance to be read when the leaves are greening, they may taste somewhat unseasonably in the mouth. For in these days the things of the spirit had lost their old authority without gaining a new graciousness, and save for one man the ancient war-cry of “God and the Kirk” had become degraded to “The Kirk and God.”

This is the story of the one man whose weak and uncertain hand held aloft the Banner of Blue that I have striven to tell—his failures mostly, his loves and hates, his few bright days and his many dark nights. Yet withal I have found green vales of rest between wherein the swallow swept and the cuckoo called to her mate the cry of love and spring.

Who would know further and better of the certainty of these things must procure and read A Cameronian Apostle, by my excellent friend, the Reverend H. M. B. Reid, presently minister of the parish wherein these things were done, in whose faithful and sympathetic narrative they will find many things better told than I can tell them. The book may be had of the Messrs. Gardiner, of Paisley, in Scotland.

Yet even in this imperfect narrative of strange events there may be heard the beating of a man’s heart, weak or strong, now arrogant, and now abased, not according to the fear of man or even of the glory of God, but more according to the kindness which dwelt in woman’s eyes.

For there is but one thing stronger in the world than the love of woman. And that is not of this world.

CONTENTS.

THE STANDARD BEARER.

CHAPTER I.
THE YEAR TERRIBLE.

This is what I, Quintin MacClellan, saw on the grassy summit of the Bennan—a thing which, being seen and overpast in an hour, changed all my life, and so in time by the grace of God and the chafe of circumstances made me for good or evil the man I am.

I was a herd laddie at the time, like David, keeping my father’s flocks and kicking up my heels among the collie tykes, with many another shepherd-boy in the wide moorish parishes of Minnigaff, Dalry and the Kells.

Now my father (and his father before him) had been all his life “indweller” in the hill farm of Ardarroch which sits on the purple braeface above the loch of Ken, with a little circumambient yard enclosed by cattle-offices and a dozen red-stemmed fir trees, in which the winds and the birds sing after their kind, winter and summer.

A sweet and grateful spot do I now remember that Ardarroch to be, and in these later days when I have tried so mickle of bliss and teen, and wearied my life out in so many wanderings and strivings, my heart still goes out kindly to the well-beloved place of my bairn-play.

It was the high summer of the fatal year 1685, when I saw the sight which put an end to my childhood. Well do I mind it that year, for amongst others, my father had to go for a while into hiding—not that he was any over-strenuous Covenant man, but solely because he had never in his life refused bite and sup to any neighbour hard pressed, nor yet to any decent chiel who might scarcely be able to give an account of the quarrel he had with the Tyrant’s laws.

So, during his absence, my brothers and I had the work of the farm to attend to. No dawn of day sifting from the east through the greenery of the great sloughing beeches and firs about the door ever found any of the three of us in our beds. For me, I was up and away to the hills—where sometimes in the full lambing time I would spend all night on the heathery fells or among the lirks and hidden dells of the mountain fastnesses.

And oh, but it was pleasant work and I liked it well! The breathing airs; the wide, starry arch I looked up into, when night had drawn her night-cap low down over the girdling blue-black hills; the moon glinting on the breast of Loch Ken; the moor-birds, whaup and snipe, plover and wild duck cheeping and chummering in their nests, while the wood-doves’ moan rose plaintive from every copse and covert—it was a fit birthplace for a young lad’s soul. Though indeed at that time none was farther from guessing it than Quintin MacClellan. For as I went hither and thither I pondered on nothing except the fine hunger the hills gave me, and the glorious draughts of whey and buttermilk my mother would serve out to me on my return, calling me meantime the greatest and silliest of her calves, besides tweaking my ears at the milk-house door if she could catch me ere I set my bare legs twinkling down the loaning.

For the time being I say nothing more of my father, “douce John of Ardarroch,” as all the parish called him, save that he was a moderate man and no high-flier as he would have described himself—yet out of whom his wife (and my good mother) had, by the constant dropping of argument, made a Covenant man, and even a fairly consistent follower of the Hill Folk. Neither will I bide to speak of my brothers Hob and David, for their names and characters will have occasion to appear as I write down my own strange history. Nor yet can I pause to tell of the sweetness and grace of my sister Anna, whose brown eyes held a charm which even my boyish and brotherly insensibility acknowledged and delighted in, being my elder by half-a-dozen years, and growing up amongst us rough louts of the heather like a white rose in the stocky corner of an herb-garden.

For I must tell of myself and what befell me on the Bennan top the twenty-first day of June—high Midsummer Day of the Year Terrible, and of all that it brought to me.

I had heard, indeed, often enough of chasings, of prisonments, of men and women sent away over-seas to the cruel plantations, of the boot and the thumbscrew, of the blood of slain men reddening the heather behind dyke-backs. There was indeed little talk of anything else throughout all the land of the South and West. But it so chanced that our House of Ardarroch, being set high up on the side of Bennan, and with no prominent Covenanters near by to be a mark for the fury of the persecutor, we MacClellans had thus far escaped unquestioned and scathless.

Once, indeed, Lidderdale of the Isle, with twenty men, had made us a visitation and inquired somewhat curiously of us, and specially of my mother, whom we had entertained on such a night and whom on such another. After this occasion it was judged expedient that my father should keep wide of his own house for a while, lest the strict laws against intercommuning[1] should lay him by the heels in the gaol of Kirkcudbright.

But to the young and healthy—so long at least as there is clothing for the back, good filling for the hungry belly, and no startling and personal evil befal—tales of ill, unseen and unproven, fall on the ear like the clatter of ancient head-shaking beldames croaking to each other by unswept ingle-nooks. At least, so it was with me.

But to my tale of Midsummer Day of the Terrible Year.

I had been out, since earliest morn, over the rough rigs of heather looking tentily to my sheep, for I had been “hefting” (as the business is called in our Galloway land) a double score of lambs which had just been brought from a neighbouring lowland farm to summer upon our scanty upland pastures. Now it is the nature of sheep to return if they can to their mother-hill, or, at least, to stray further and further seeking some well-known landmark. So, till such new-comers grow satisfied and “heft” (or attach) themselves to the soil, they must be watched carefully both night and day.

I was at this time thirteen years of my age, well nourished and light of foot as a mountain goat. Indeed, there was not a goat in the herd that I could not run down and grip by the neck. And when Hob, my elder brother, would take after me because of some mischief I had wrought, I warrant he had a long chase and a sore sweat before he caught me, if I got but ten yards’ start and the heather free before me.

This day I had a couple of fine muckle scones in my pocket, which my mother had given me, besides one I had purloined for myself when she was not looking, but which my sister Anna had seen me take and silently shaken her head. That, however, I minded not a fly. Also I snatched up a little square book from the window-sill, hoping that in it I might find some entertainment to while away the hours in the bield of some granite stone or behind some bush of heather. But I found it to be the collect of Mr. Samuel Rutherford, his letters from Aberdeen and Anwoth, and at first I counted the reading of it dull enough work. But afterwards, because of the names of kenned places in our Galloway and also the fine well-smacking Scottish words in it, I liked it none so ill.

Ashie and Gray, my dogs, sat on either side of me. Brother and sister they were, of one year and litter, yet diverse as any human brother and sister—Ashie being gay and frisky, ever full of freits and caperings; his sister Gray, on the other hand, sober as a hill-preaching when Clavers is out on the heather looking for it.

As for Ashie, he nipped himself in the flank and pursued after his own tail as if he had taken some ill-will at it. But old-maidish Gray sat erect, cocking her short ears and keeping a sharp eye on the “hefting” lambs, which went aimlessly straying and cropping below, seeking in vain for holms as kindly and pastures as succulent as those of the valley-crofts from which my father had driven them a day or two before.

For myself, in the intervals of my reading, I had been singing a merry stave, one you may be sure that I did not let my mother or my sister Anna hear. I had learnt it from wild David, who had brought the broad sheet back with him from Keltonhill Fair. Thus I had been carolling, gay as the laverock which I watched flirting and pulsing upwards out of the dun bents of the fell. But after a while the small print of my book and, perhaps, also the high instructiveness of the matter inclined me towards sleep.

The bleating of the sundered lambs desirous of lost motherly udders fell more soothingly and plaintively upon my ear. It seemed to bring dreams pleasant and delightful with it. I heard the note sink and change to that heavenly murmuring that comes with drowsiness, or which, mayhap, is but the sound of the porter opening the Poppy Gates of sleep—and which may break yet more delightfully on our ears when the gates that open for us are the gates of death.

I suppose that all the afternoon the whaups had piped and “willywhaaed,” the snipes bleated and whinnied overhead, and that the peewits had complained to each other of the question boy-beast below them, which ran on two legs and waved other two so foolishly in the air. But I did not hear them. My ears were dulled. The moorland sounds melted deliciously into the very sough and murmur of reposefulness. I was already well on my way to Drowsieland. I heard my mother sing me a lullaby somewhere among the tranced fields. Suddenly the cradle-song ceased. Through shut eyelids I grew conscious of a disturbing influence. Though my face nestled deep down in the crook of my arm I knew that Ashie and Gray had all suddenly sat up.

“Ouf-f!” quoth Ashie protestingly, deep in his stomach so that the sound would carry no further than his master’s ear.

“Gur-r-r!” growled Gray, his sister, yet more softly, the black wicks of her mouth pulled away from her wicked shining eye-teeth.

Thinking that the sheep were straying and that it might be as well by a timely shout to save myself miles and miles of hot chase over the heather, I sat up, ungraciously discontented to be thus aroused, and yet more unreasonably angry with the dogs whose watchfulness had recalled me to the realities of life. As I raised my head, the sounds of the hills broke on my ear suddenly loud—indeed almost insolently insistant. The suppressed far-away hush of Dreamland scattered itself like a broken glass before the brisk clamour of the broad wind-stirred day.

I glanced at the flock beneath me. They were feeding and straying quietly enough—rather widely perhaps, but nothing to make a fret about.

“Restless tykes!” I muttered irritably, striking right and left at the dogs with my staff. “De’il take you, silly beasts that ye are!”

“Ouf-f!” said Ashie, warningly as before, but from a safer distance, his nose pointing directly away from the hefting lambs. Gray said nothing, but uncovered her shining teeth a little further and cocked her ears more directly towards the summit of the Bennan behind me.

I looked about me high and low, but still I could see no cause for alarm.

“Daft brutes! Silly beasts!” I cried again more crossly than ever. And with that I was about to consign myself to sleep again, or at least to seek the pleasant paths of the day-dreamland from which I had been so abruptly recalled.

But the dogs with bristling hair, cocked ears and proudly-plumaged tails were already ten yards up the slope towards the top of the fell, sniffing belligerently as though they scented an intrusive stranger dog at the entering in of the sacred enclosure of the farmyard of Ardarroch.

I was reaching for my stick to deal it liberally between them when a waft of warm summer wind brought to my ear the sound of the distant crying of men. Then came the clear, imperative “Crack! Crack!” of musket shots—first two, and then half-a-dozen close together, sharp and distinct as an eager schoolboy snapping his finger and thumb to call the attention of the master to whom he has been forbidden to speak.

Then, again, on the back of this arrived silence, issuing presently in a great disturbed clamour of peewit flocks on the table-lands above me, clouds of them stooping and swooping, screaming and scolding at some unlicensed and unprincipled intruders by me unseen.

I knew well what it meant in a moment. The man-hunt was afoot. The folk of God were once more being pursued like the partridge upon the mountain. It might be that the blood of my own father was even now making another crimson blossom of martyr blood upon the moors of Scotland.

“Down, down, Ashie!” I cried, but under my breath. “Come in to my foot, Gray!” And, knowing by the voice that I was much in earnest, very obediently the dogs slung behind with, however, many little protesting “gurrs” and chest rumblings of muffled rage.

“It must be Lag himself from the Garry-horn,” I thought; “he will be at his old work of pursuing the wanderers with bloodhound and troop-horse.”

Then, with the craft which had perhaps been born in me and which had certainly been fostered by the years of watching and hiding, of open hatred and secret suspicion, I crept cautiously up the side of the fell, taking advantage of every tummock of heather and boss of tall bent grass. Ashie and Gray crawled after me, stiff with intent hate, but every whit as flatly prone and as infinitely cautious as their master.

For they, too, had been born in the Days of Fear, and the spirit of the game had entered into them ere ever they emerged from the blindness of puppydom.

As we ascended, nearer and nearer sounded the turmoil. I heard, as it were, the sound of men’s voices encouraging each other, as the huntsmen do on the hillsides when they drive the red fox from his lair. Then came the baying of dogs and the clattering of irregular musketry.

Till now the collies and I had been sheltered by the grey clints and lichened rocks of the Bennan, but now we had to come out into the open. The last thirty yards of ascent were bare and shelterless, the short, mossy scalp of turf upon them being clean shaven as if cut with a razor.

My heart beat fast, I can tell you who read this tale so comfortably by the ingle-nook. I held it down with my hand as I crept upwards. Ashie and Gray followed like four-footed guardian angels behind, now dragging themselves painfully yard by yard upon their bellies, now lying motionless as stone statues, their moist jowls pressed to the ground and their dilated nostrils snuffing the air for the intelligence which only my duller eyes could bring me.

Yet I knew the risks of the attempt. For as soon as I had left the shelter of the boulders and scattered clumps of heather and bent, I was plain to the sight as a fly crawling over the shell of an egg.

Nevertheless, with a quick rush I reached the top and set my head over.

CHAPTER II.
THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS.

The broad, flat table-top of the Bennan summit spread out before me like an exercise ground for troops or a racecourse for horses.

Yet not all barren or desolate, for here and there among the grey granite peeped forth the bloom of the young heather, making a livelier purple amid the burnt brown of the short grass, which in its turn was diversified by the vivid emerald green circling the “quacking-quaas” or bottomless moss-holes of the bogs beneath.

Now this is what I saw, lying on my face, with no more than my chin set over the edge—two men in tattered, peat-stained clothing running for their lives towards the edge of the little plateau farthest from me.

Between me and them twenty or thirty dragoons were urging their horses forward in pursuit, weaving this way and that among the soft lairy places, and as many more whose steeds had stuck fast in the moss were coursing the fugitives on foot as though the poor men had been beasts of the field.

Every now and then one of the pursuers would stop, set his musket to his shoulder and blaze away with a loud report and a drift of white smoke, shouting joyously as at a rare jest whether he hit or missed. And I thought that the poor lads would make good their escape with such sorry marksmen. But even whilst I was putting up a prayer for them as I lay panting upon the manifest edge, a chance shot struck the smaller and more slender of the wanderers. He stumbled, poor wretch, and fell forward upon his face. Then, mastering himself, and recognising his grievous case and how much of mercy he had to look for if his enemies came up with him, his strong spirit for an instant conquered his bodily hurt.

He rose immediately, set his hands one over the other upon his side, doubtless to stay the welling gap the bullet had riven there, and ran yet more determinedly after his companion. But close to the further verge his power went from him. His companion halted and would have come back to aid him, or more likely to die with him. But the wounded man threw out his hand in vehement protest.

“Run, Sandy,” he cried, so loudly and eagerly that I could easily hear him through all the shouting and pother. “It will do no good. I am sped. Save yourself—God have mercy—tell Margaret——!”

But what he would have told Margaret I know not, for even then he spread out his arms and fell forward on his face in the spongy moss.

At this his companion turned sharply and ran on by himself, finally disappearing among the granite boulders amid a brisk crackling of the soldiers’ pieces.

But their marksmanship was poor, for though they were near to him, what with the breathless race and the unevenness of the ground, not a shot took effect. Nor showed he any sign of scathe when last I saw him, leaping nimbly from clump to clump of bent, where the green slimy moss wet with the peat-brew keeps all soft as a quicksand, so that neither hoof of a charger nor heavy military boot dare venture upon it, though the bare accustomed foot of one bred to the hills may carry him across easily enough. So the fugitive, a tall, burly man, cumbered with little besides a doublet and short hose, disappeared out of my sight, and the plain was bare save for the disappointed dragoons in their red coats and the poor man left fallen on his face in the morass.

I could never see him move hand or foot after he fell; and, indeed, it was not long that he had the chance. For even as I continued to gaze fascinated at the scene of blood which so suddenly had broken in upon the pastoral peace of our Kells hills, I saw a tall, dark soldier, one evidently of some authority among them, stride up to the fallen man. He strove to turn him over with his foot, but the moss clung, and he could not. So without a moment’s hesitation he took a musket from the nearest dragoon, glanced coolly at the priming of the touch, set the butt to his shoulder, and with the muzzle within a foot shot the full charge into the back of the prostrate man.

At this I could command myself no longer. The pursuit and the shooting at the fugitives, even the killing when at least they had a chance for their lives, seemed nothing to this stony-hearted butchery. I gat me up on my feet, and in a boyish frenzy shouted curses upon the murderer.

“God shall send thee to hell for this, wicked man, black murderer that thou art!” I cried, shaking my clenched hand, like the angry impotent child I was.

The soldiers who were searching here and there, as it were, for more victims among the coverts turned their heads my way and gazed, hearing the voice but seeing no man. Others who stood upon the verge, taking shots as fast as they could load at the man who had escaped, also turned. I yelled at them that they were to show themselves brave soldiers, and shoot me also. The tall, dark buirdly man in the red coat who had fired into the wounded man cried to them “to take a shot at the damned young Whig.” But I think the men were all too much surprised at my bold words to do it, for none moved, so that the speaker was obliged to snatch a pistol from his own belt, and let fly at me himself.

The whistle of the pistol ball as it sped harmlessly by waked me as from a dream. A quick horror took me by the throat. I seemed to see myself laid face down on the turf and the murderer of the poor wanderer pouring shot after shot into my back. I felt my knees tremble, and it seemed (as it often does in a nightmare) that if he pursued I should be unable to move. But even as I saw the man in red reach for his other pistol the power came back to my limbs.

I turned and ran without knowing it, for the next thing I remember was the scuff of the wind about my ears as I sped recklessly down the steepest slope, with no feeling that my feet were touching the ground at all. I saw Ashie and Gray scouring far before me, with their tails clapped between their legs, for I suppose that their master’s fear had communicated itself to them. Yet all the time I knew well that a single false step, a stumble upon a twisted root of burnt heather, a treacherous clump of grass amid the green slime of the morass, and the fate of the fallen martyr would be mine.

But ere I passed quite out of range I heard the rattle of a dropping fusillade from the edge of the hill above me, as a number of the soldiers let off their pieces at me, firing, I think, half in sport and half from a feeling of chagrin that they had let a more important victim escape them. I heard the whisk-whisk of the balls as they flew wide, and one whizzed past my ear and buried itself with a vicious spit in the moss a yard or two before me as I ran—but all harmless, and soon I was out of range. For I think it was more in cruel jest and with raffish laughter than with any intent to harm me that the soldiers fired.

Nevertheless, my boy’s heart was full of wild fear. I had seen murder done. The wholesome green earth was spotted black with crime. Red motes danced in the sunshine. The sun himself in the wide blue heavens seemed turned to blood.

Then, all suddenly, I thought of my mother, and my heart stood still. It would soon be the hour at which it was her custom to take out victual to the little craggy linn where my father was in hiding. So with a new access of terror I turned towards our house of Ardarroch, and ran to warn her of what I had seen upon the Bennan top.

I felt as I sped along that life could never be the same to me again. From a heedless boy I had grown into a man in one unutterable hour. I had, of course, heard much of killings, and even as a child the relation of the cruelties of the Highland Host had impressed me so that the red glinting of a soldier’s coat would send me into the deepest thickets of Ardarroch wood. But it was the musket shot poured into the back of the poor helpless lad on the Bennan that made a lifelong Covenanter of Quintin MacClellan.

CHAPTER III.
THE LITTLE LADY OF EARLSTOUN.

But it was not the will of God that I should warn my mother that day; for even as I ran, threading my way among the scattered boulders and whin bushes of the lower slopes, I came upon that which surprised me almost as greatly as the shooting itself.

Right in my path a little girl was sitting on a green mound like a deserted ant hillock: She had long yellow hair, and a red cloak was about her, with a hood to it, which came over her head and partly shaded her brow. A wooden pail had been placed carefully on the heather at her feet. Now, what with the perturbation of my spirits and my head being full of country tales of bogles and elves, at the first glance I took the maid for one of these, and would have avoided and given her a wide berth as something much less than canny.

But she wiped her eyes with her little white hand, and as I looked more closely I saw that she had been crying, for her face was rubbed red, and her cheeks all harrowed and begrutten with tears.

So at that I feared no more, but went nearer. She seemed about seven or eight, and very well grown for her age.

“Why do you cry, little maid?” I said to her, standing before her in the green path.

For a while she did not answer, but continued to sob. I went near to comfort her, but she thrust her hand impatiently out at me.

“Do not touch me, ragged boy,” she said; “it is not for herd laddies to touch little ladies.”

And she spoke the words with such mightily offended dignity that on another occasion I would have laughed.

Then she commanded herself and dried her eyes on her red cloak.

“Carry the can and come with me to find my father,” she ordered, pointing imperiously with her finger as if I had been no better than a blackamoor slave in the plantations.

I lifted the wooden pail. It contained, as I think, cakes of oatmeal with cheese and butter wrapped in green leaves. But the little girl would not let me so much as look within.

“These are for my father,” she said; “my father is the greatest man in the whole world!”

“But who may your father be, little one?” I asked her, standing stock still on the green highway with the can in my hand. She was daintily arranging the cloak about her like a fine lady. She paused, and looked at me very grave and not a little indignant.

“That is not for you to know,” she said, with dignity; “follow me with the pail.”

So saying she stalked away with dignified carriage in the direction of the hill-top. A wild fear seized me. One of the two men I had seen fleeing might be the little girl’s father. Perhaps he into whose back—ah! at all hazards I must not let her go that way.

“Could we not rest awhile here,” I suggested, “here behind this bush? There are wicked men upon the hill, and they might take away the pail from us.”

“Then my father would kill them,” she said, shaking her head sagely, but never stopping a moment on her upward way. “Besides, my mother told me to take the pail to the hill-top and stand there in my red cloak till my father should come. But it was so hot and the pail so heavy that——”

“That you cried?” I said as she stopped.

“Nay,” she answered with an offended look; “little ladies do not cry. I was only sorry out loud that my father should be kept waiting so long.”

“And your mother sent you all this way by yourself; was not that cruel of her?” I went on to try her.

“Little ragged boy,” she said, looking at me with a certain compassion, “you do not know what you are saying. I cannot, indeed, tell you who my father is, but I am Mary Gordon, and my mother is the Lady of Earlstoun.”

So I was speaking to the daughter of Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun, the most famous Covenanter in Scotland, and, next to my Lord Viscount of Kenmure, the chief landowner in our countryside.

“And have you come alone all the way from Earlstoun hither?” I asked in astonishment, for the distance was at least four or five miles and the road rough and ill-trodden.

“Nay,” she made answer, “not so. My mother set me so far upon the way, and now she waits for me by the bushes yonder, so that I must make haste and return. We came in a boat to your water-foot down there where the little bay is and the pretty white sand.”

And she pointed with her hand to where the peaty water of the moorland stream mingled with and stained the deep blue of the loch.

“Haste you, laddie,” she cried sharply a moment after; “my father is not a one to be kept waiting. He will be impatient and angry. And because he is so great a man his anger is hard to bide.”

“You must not go up to the hill-top,” I said, “for there are many bad men on the Bennan to-day, and they would perhaps kill you.”

“But my father is there,” said she, stopping and looking at me reproachfully. “I must go; my mother bade me.”

And haply at that moment I saw the entire company of soldiers, led by the man in the red coat, stringing down the farther side of the mountain in the line of flight by which the second fugitive had made good his escape. So I judged it might be as well to satisfy the lass and let her go on to the top. Indeed, short of laying hold of her by force, I knew not well how to hinder so instant and imperious a dame.

Besides, I thought that by a little generalship I would be able to keep her wide of the place where lay the poor body of the slain man.

So straight up the hill upon which I had seen such terrible things we went, Ashie and Gray slinking unwillingly and shamefacedly behind. And as I went I cast an eye to my flock. And it appeared strange to me that the lambs should still be feeding quietly and peacefully down there, cropping and straying on the green scattered pastures of Ardarroch. Yet in the interval all the world had changed to me.

We reached the summit.

“Here is the place I was to wait for my father,” said Mary Gordon. “I must arrange my hair, little boy, for my father loves to see me well-ordered, though he is indeed himself most careless in his attiring.”

She gave vent to a long sigh, as if her father’s delinquencies of toilette had proved a matter of lifelong sorrow to her.

“But then, you see, my father is a great man and does as he pleases.”

She put her hand to her brow and looked under the sun this way and that over the moor.

“There are so many evil men hereabout—your father may have gone down the further side to escape them,” I said. For I desired to withdraw her gaze from the northern verge of the tableland, where, as I well knew, lay a poor riven body, which, for all I knew, might be that of the little maid’s father, silent, shapeless, and for ever at rest.

“Let us go there, then, and wait,” she said, more placably and in more docile fashion than she had yet shown.

So we crossed the short crisp heather, and I walked between her and that which lay off upon our right hand, so that she should not see it.

But the dogs Ashie and Gray were almost too much for me. For they had gone straight to the body of the slain man, and Ashie, ill-conditioned brute, sat him down as a dog does when he bays the moon, and, stretching out his neck and head towards the sky, he gave vent to his feelings in a long howl of agony. Gray snuffed at the body, but contented herself with a sharp occasional snarl of angry protest.

“What is that the dogs have found over there?” said the little maid, looking round me.

“Some dead sheep or other; there are many of them about,” I answered, with shameless mendacity.

“Have your Bennan sheep brown coats?” she asked, innocently enough.

I looked and saw that the homespun of the man’s attire was plain to be seen. “My father has been here before me, and has cast his mantle over the sheep to keep the body from the sun and the flies.”

For which lie the Lord will, I trust, pardon me, considering the necessity and that I was but a lad.

At any rate the maid was satisfied, and we took our way to the northern edge of the Bennan top.

CHAPTER IV.
MY SISTER ANNA.

Wending our way through the tangle of brown morass and grey boulder, we arrived, the little maid and I, at the extremity of the spur which looks towards the north. Immediately beneath us, already filling in with the oozy peat, I saw the ploughing steps of the successful fugitive, where he had leaped and slid down the soft mossy slopes. There to the right was the harder path by which the dragoons had led their horses, jibbing and stumbling as they went. But all were now passed away, and the landscape from verge to verge was bare and empty save for a few scarlet dots bobbing and weaving athwart one another down on the lake-shore, as the soldiers drew near their camp. Even the clamorous peewits had returned, and were already sweeping and complaining foolishly overhead, doubtless telling each other the tale of how the noise and white-blowing smoke had frightened them from their eggs among the heather.

The little lass stood awhile and gazed about her.

“Certainly my father will see me now,” she said, cheerfully enough; “I am sure he will be looking, and then he will know that all is well when his little girl is here.”

And she looked as if she were ready to protect Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun against Lag and all his troopers. But after a little I saw an anxious look steal over her face.

“He is not coming. He does not see his little Mary!” she said, wistfully.

Then she ran to the top of the highest knoll, and taking off her red cloak she waved it, crying out, “Father, father, it is I—little Mary! Do not be afraid!”

A pair of screeching wildfowl swooped indignantly nearer, but no other voice replied. I feared that she might insist upon examining that which lay under the brown coat, for that it covered either her father or one of her kinsfolk I was well persuaded. The Bennan top had been without doubt the hiding-place of many besides Alexander Gordon. But at this time none were sought for in the Glenkens save the man upon whose head, because of the late plot anent the King’s life, there was set so great a price. And, moreover, had the lady of Earlstoun not sent her daughter to that very place with provender, as being the more likely to win through to her husband unharmed and unsuspected?

Suddenly Mary burst into tears.

“I can not find him!” she cried; “and he will be so hungry, and think that his little girl dared not come to find him! Besides, all the oaten cakes that were baked but this morning will be quite spoiled!”

I tried my best to comfort her, but she would not let me so much as touch her. And, being an ignorant landward lad, I could not find the fitting words wherewithal to speak to a maiden gently bred like the little Mary Gordon.

At last, however, she dried her tears. “Let us leave the cakes here, and take the basket and go our way back again. For the lady my mother will be weary with waiting for me so long by the waterside.”

So we two went down the hill again very sadly, and as we passed by she cast her eyes curiously over at the poor lad who lay so still on his face in the soft lair of the peat moss.

“That is a strange sheep,” she said; “it looks more like a man lying asleep.”

So, passing by, we went down both of us together, and as we pushed a way through the bracken towards our own house of Ardarroch, I saw my sister Anna come up the burn-side among the light flickering shadows of the birch and alder bushes. And when we came nearer to her I saw that she, too, had been weeping. Now this also went to my heart with a heavy sense of the beginning of unknown troubles. Ever since, from my sweet sleep of security on the hillside I had been suddenly flung into the midst of a troublous sea, there seemed no end to the griefs, like waves that press behind each other rank behind rank to the horizon.

“Has my father been taken?” I cried anxiously to Anna, as she came near. For that was our chief household fear at that time.

“Nay,” she answered, standing still to look in astonishment at my little companion; “but there are soldiers in the house, and they have turned everything this way and that to seek for him, and have also dealt roughly with my mother.”

Hearing which, I was for running down to help, but Anna bade me to bide where I was. I would only do harm, she said. She had been sent to keep Hob and David on the hill, my mother being well assured that the soldiers would do her no harm for all the roughness of their talk.

“And who is this?” said Anna, looking kindly down at little Mary Gordon.

I expected the little maid to answer as high and quick as she had done to me; but she stood fixed and intent awhile upon Anna, and then she went directly up to her and put her hand into that of my sister. There was ever, indeed, that about Anna which drew all children to her. And now the proud daughter of the laird of Earlstoun went to her as readily as a tottering cottar’s bairn.

“You will take me to my mother, will you not?” she said, nestling contentedly with her cheek against Anna’s homespun kirtle.

“That will I, and blithely, lambie!” my sister answered, heartily, “if ye will tell me who the mother o’ ye may be, and where she bides.”

But when I had told her, I saw Anna look suddenly blank, and the colour fade from her face.

“By the waterside—your mother!” she said, with a kind of fluttering uncertain apprehension in her voice. For my sister Anna’s voice was like a stringed instrument, quavering and thrilling to the least thought of her heart.

We three turned to go down the hill to the waterside. I caught Anna’s eye, and, observing by its signalling that she wished to speak with me apart, I allowed the little girl to precede us on the winding sheep track, which was all the path leading up the Bennan side.

“The soldiers had taken her mother away with them in the boat to question her. They suspected that she came to the water foot to meet her husband,” whispered Anna. “You must take the little one back to her folk—or else, if you are afraid to venture, Hob or David will go instead of you.”

“Neither Hob nor yet David shall get the chance; I will go myself,” cried I, firing at the notion that my two brothers could carry out such a commission better than I. “If you, Anna, will look to the sheep, I will leave Ashie and Gray behind to help you.”

“I will indeed gladly stay and see that all is kept in due order,” said Anna, and I knew that she was as good a herd as any one, and that when she undertook a thing she would surely perform it.

So I took leave of my sister, and she gave me some pieces of barley bread and also a few savoury crumblings she had discovered in the pocket which was swung on the outside of her short kirtle.

“I will not go with you; I want to stay with this nice great girl, or else go home to my mother!” cried the imperious little maid, stamping her foot and shaking her yellow curls vehemently as if she cherished a spite against me.

“Your mother has been obliged to go home without you,” I said, “but she has left word that you are to come with me, and I will take you home.”

“I do not believe it; you are nothing but a little, ragged, silly boy,” she answered, shaking her finger contemptuously at me.

I appealed to Anna.

“Is it not so?” I said.

Anna turned gently to little Mary Gordon.

“Go with him, childie,” she said; “your mother was compelled to go away and leave you. My brother will bring you safe. Quintin is a good lad and will take great care of you. Let him take you home, will you not?”

And the child looked long up into the deep, untroubled brown eyes of Anna, my sister, and was vanquished.

“I will go with the boy anywhere if you bid me,” she said.

(Note and Addition by me, Hob MacClellan,
Elder Brother of the Writer.)

It chances that I, Hob MacClellan, have come into possession of the papers of Quintin, my brother, and also of many interesting documents that belonged to him. In time I shall leave them to his son Quintin, but ere they pass out of my hands it is laid upon me that I insert sundry observes upon them for the better understanding of what Quintin hath written.

For this brother of mine, whom for love I served forty years as a thirled labourer serves for his meat, whom I kept from a thousand dangers, whom I guided as a mother doth a bairn that learns to walk, holding it by the coaties behind—this Quintin whose fame is in all Scotland was a man too wrapt and godly to be well able to take care of the things of the moment, and all his life needed one to be in tendance upon him, and to see that all went forward as it ought.

My mother and his, a shrewd woman of the borderside stock, Elliot her name, used often to say, “Hob, keep a firm catch o’ Quintin. For though he may stir up the world and have the care of all the churches, yet like a bairn he needs one to draw tight the buckle of his trews, and see that he goes not to preach in the habit in which he rose from bed!”

So it came about that I, having no clearness as to leaving him to himself, abode mostly near him, keeping the door of his chamber, as it were, on all the great occasions of his life. And Quintin my brother, though we differed ofttimes, ever paid me in love and the bond of an unbroken brotherhood. Also what he had I had, hand and siller, bite or sup, poverty and riches. I tilled his glebe. I brought home his kye and milked them. I stood at his back in the day of calamity. I was his groom when first he married so strangely. Yet through all I abode plain dour Hob MacClellan, to all the parish and wider far—the “minister’s brother!”

And there are folk who have held me stupid because that ordinarily I found little to say, or dull in that I mixed not with their pothouse jollity, or proud because I could be better company to myself than a score of clattering fools.

Not that I despised the friendly converse in the green loaning when a man meets a man, or a man a bonny lass, nor yet the merry meeting about the ingle in the heartsome forenights, for I own that at one time my mind lay greatly that way.

I have loved good sound jocund mirth all my days; aye, and often learned that which proved of great advantage at such times, just because folk had no fear, but would speak freely before me. Whereas, so soon as Quintin came in, there passed a hush over every face and a silence of constraint fell upon them, as if he had fetched the two tables of stone with all the Ten Commandments upon them in his coat-tail pocket.

Now, though I hold to it that there never was a man in the world like our Quintin, at least, never since Richard Cameron was put down in red-running blood on the Moss of Ayr, yet I am free to admit that Quintin often saw things without that saving salt of humour which would have given him so much easier a tramp through the whins and thickets of life.

But this could not be. Quintin had by nature mother-wit enough, but he ever took things too hardly, and let them press upon his spirit when he had better have been on the ice at the channel-stanes than on his knees in his closet. At least that is my thought of it.

For some men see the upper side of human affairs, and some the under. But few there be who see both sides of things. And if any of the doctrines for which our Quintin fought seemed to me as the thin wind-clouds streaked like mare’s tails high in the lift, the heartsome mirth and country gif-gaf,[2] which ofttimes made my heart cheerier, appeared to him but as the crackling of thorns under a pot.

And so when it shall be that this wondrous narrative of my brother Quintin’s life (for it is both wondrous and true) is finally set forth for the edification of men and women, I recommend whoever has the perusal of it to read over also my few chapters of observes, that he may understand the true inwardness of the narrative and, as it were, the ingates as well as the outgates of it.

Now, for instance, there is this matter of the killing of the man upon the hill. Quintin hath written all his story, yet never said in three words that the man was not Muckle Sandy Gordon, the father of the little lass. He was, in fact, the son of one Edgar of Milnthird, and reported a clever lad at his trade, which was that of a saddler in Dumfries. He had in his time great fights with the devil, who beset him roaring like a lion in the caves of Crichope and other wild glens. But this John Edgar would always vanquish him till he put on the red coat of Rob Grier of Lag, that noted persecutor. And so the poor lad got a settling shot through the back even as Quintin has written.

And, again, when Quintin says that it was the memory of that day which set him marching to Edinburgh with me at his elbow, to hold Clavers and his troop of Lairds and Highlandmen in order—well, in my opinion we both marched to Edinburgh because my father bade us. And at that time even Quintin did not disobey his father, though I will say that, having the soft side of my mother, he got more of his own way even from a bairn than is good for any one.

CHAPTER V.
I CONSTRUCT A RAFT.
[The Narrative is again from the MS. of Quintin MacClellan.]

It was growing dusk when Mary Gordon and I came to the edge of the lake. Now, Loch Ken, though a narrow and winding piece of water, and more the extension of the river than, as it were, a lake of set intent, has yet many broad, still stretches and unexpected inlets, where it is a paradise for children to play. And these I knew like the way to our well at Ardarroch.

As Anna had foretold, we found upon the white sands neither the Lady of Earlstoun, nor yet the boat in which Mary and she had come from the head of the loch. We saw, however, the rut which the prow of the boat had made in taking the pebbles, and the large stone to which it had been fastened was there. The shingle also was displaced, and all about were deeply marked footprints like those made by men who bear a heavy burden.

Then, when I had sat down on a boulder by the water’s edge, I drew the little maid to my knee, and told her that I must take her home to find her mother. And also that because the Earlstoun was a long way off, she must let me carry her sometimes when she grew weary.

“Is that what Anna would wish?” she asked, for from the first she had called my sister nothing else.

I told her that it was, and immediately she put her hand in mine, yet not willingly nor yet trustingly as she had done to Anna, but rather with an air of protest and like one who does an irksome but necessary duty.

At the point of the loch at which we had arrived the trees crept down the hillside quite to the edge of the water, so that for the first quarter of a mile Mary Gordon and I proceeded northwards without ever needing to show ourselves out in the open.

Then there comes the narrow pass between the steepest crags of the Bennan and the water’s edge. We had been moving cautiously through the trees, and were indeed just about to emerge from the brushwood, when a rotten stick cracked beneath my foot. Instantly a soldier’s challenge rang sharply out in front of us.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

Though little better than bairns Mary Gordon and I cowered with the instinctive craft born of years of persecution and concealment. Again the man cried, “Show yourselves there, or I fire!”

But as we lay still as death behind the tree he did not think it necessary to enter the wood—where, indeed, for all he knew a score of armed and desperate Whigs might have been in hiding.

Then we could hear his neighbours hail him from the next post and ask what the matter was.

“I heard a noise in the wood,” he returned, gruffly enough.

“A wandering pig or a goat from the hill!” cried his comrade higher up, cheerily. “There are many of them about.” But the man in front of us was sullen and did not reply.

“Sulky dog!” cried the man who had spoken—as it were, in order to close the conversation pleasantly.

The sound of his voice caused me to stop and reflect.

The hail of the second soldier had come distinctly from the rocks of the Bennan, therefore their commander had established a cordon of sentries in order to prevent the escape of some noted fugitive. What chance was there for a couple of children to pass the guarded line? By myself I might, indeed, have managed. I could well enough have rushed across the line when the sentry was at the extreme point of his beat, and risked a bullet as I plunged into the next belt of woodland; but, cumbered with the care of a maiden of tender years, this was impossible.

The night had drawn down into a cool, pleasant darkness. Softly Mary Gordon and I withdrew, taking care that no more rotten sticks should snap beneath our feet. For I knew that in the present state of the sentry’s temper we would certainly not escape so easily.

Presently, at the southern verge of the straggling copse of hazel, and therefore close to the edge of the lake, we came upon a couple of sheepfolds. One of these belonged to our own farm of Ardarroch, and the other to our kindly neighbour, John Fullerton of the Bennan.

“I am tired—take me home. You promised to take me home!”

The little maid’s voice was full of pitifulness and tears as she found herself going further and further from the house of Earlstoun.

“We cannot pass that way—the soldier men would shoot us,” I answered her with truth.

“Then take me to my Auntie Jean,” she persisted, catching at my hand pettishly, and then throwing it from her, “and my mother will come for me in the morning.”

“But where does your Auntie Jean live?”

“How can I tell—it is such a long way?” she answered. “It is in a house in the middle of a loch!”

Now this could only mean in the old tower of Lochinvar. But that was a yet longer and more difficult road than to the Earlstoun, and the line of sentries up the Bennan side barred our progress as completely as ever.

Nevertheless there was something attractive in the little maid’s idea. For that ancient strength, alone among all the neighbouring houses, sheltered no band of troopers. Kenmure, Earlstoun, Gordonston, and even our own little farm town of Ardarroch were all manned and watched, but the half-ruinous block-house of Lochinvar set in the midst of its moorland loch had been left untenanted. Its owner, Walter Gordon, the famous swordsman, was in exile abroad, so they said, and the place, save for a room or two, totally disrupted and broken down.

There was, therefore, no safer refuge for little Mary, if indeed her aunt dwelt there and we could find our way. Suddenly, as we looked about, an idea came to me, and, what is not so common, the means of carrying it out.

The sheepfolds (or “buchts”) in which we were hiding were walled in with rough stones from the hill, piled so as to form dry dykes, high and strong, and the entrances were defended by heavy wooden gates swung upon posts driven deep into the ground. The gates lifted away easily from their hinges. Two or three of these would make a secure enough raft if I could only fasten them together. And even as I set about to find ways and means, I was conscious of a change. A strange elation took me at the heart, and ran through my veins like unaccustomed wine.

I was no longer the careless herd laddie. I had entered life. I knew the penalty of failure. The man in the brown coat lying prone on his face up there above me on the crest of the Bennan quite clearly and sufficiently pointed that moral.

So, with the little girl close behind me, I searched both sets of “buchts” from end to end. I found three gates which could be easily detached from their posts. These I dismounted one after another.

How, then, was I to get them to the water’s edge, for they were far too heavy for my puny strength? I could only break a limb from a tree and draw them down to the loch shore on that, even as I had often helped my father to bring home his faggots of firewood from the hill upon a carr, or trail-cart of brushwood.

So we set off for the wood to break our branch. It was not long before I had one of beech lying upon the ground, with all its wealth of rustling leaves upon it. But the snap I made in breaking it off from the tree would certainly have betrayed us, had I not been cautious to keep a sufficient breadth of wood between us and our surly sentry.

Trailing this behind us we came again to the “ewe-buchts.”

It was now no difficult job to transport the raft of gates down to the water. I gave Mary Gordon a branch to tug at, which made her happier than anything I had done since Anna committed her to my care, for she pleased herself with thinking that she did the whole work.

I was almost on the point of using a hay-rope to bind them together as the best I could do, when I remembered that in the corner of our own “buchts” my father kept some well-tarred hempen cord, which I had seen him place there only the day before he had been compelled to go into hiding. If it chanced not to be removed, without doubt it would prove the very thing.

I found it where he had laid it, in the little shelf-press rudely constructed in the wall of four blocks of stone split into faces. There was little enough of it when I rove it out, but I thought I could make shift with it. It was, at any rate, far better than miles of hay-rope.

With this I tied the bars closely together by the corners and cross-bars, and presently had built up a very commodious raft indeed, though one more than a trifle heavy. It was some time before I hit upon a plan of launching my top-heavy craft. With the loose “stob” of a gatepost I managed to lever the crank construction to the edge of a sloping bank down which she slid so quickly that I had to set my heels into the grass and hold back with all my might.

But a moment after, without a splash more than a wild duck might make, the raft floated high above the water. With the end of the rope in my hand I climbed on board, but soon found that with my weight the top “liggate” of my craft was within an inch of the water. Clearly, then, it could not keep both of us dry.

But this troubled me little. I had not lived all my life on the shores of a loch to be afraid of swimming behind a raft on a midsummer night. For among other ploys Hob and I would often play at a sort of tilting or tournament, sitting astride of logs and trying to knock each other off into the water in the warm summer shallows.

So I placed the little girl upon the raft, cautioning her that as she hoped to see her mother again, she must in no circumstances make the least noise nor yet move from the centre of the raft where I had placed her. Soon she had begun to take an interest in the adventure, and had forgotten her weariness. She did not, however, again speak of her mother, but said that she was ready to “go for a sail” with me if I was quite sure that on the other side she should see her aunt. And this, speaking somewhat hastily, I promised without condition.

CHAPTER VI.
ACROSS THE MOONLIGHT.

For just then I became aware of a quickly growing light behind the eastern hills. It was the moon rising. I had not thought of this, and for a moment I was disconcerted. I knew that she would doubtless throw a sharp light upon the water, and that from the shore the raft would be as easily seen black against the broad and shining silver streak as if the time had been midday instead of midnight.

Then I remembered the branch which I had brought with me from the wood. I thrust the butt of it through the bars of the gates, and so disposed the leaves that from the shore they made at once a perfect shelter and a secure hiding-place for Mary, who sat there in state upon the raft, proud of going such an adventurous voyage, and perhaps also not a little elated to be up so late.

Being already stripped to the shirt and small clothes, I took off the former also, and dropped silently into the water behind the raft. I found the water warm, for the hot sun of June had beat upon it all the long day. A chill wind had sprung up within the last hour, and the wavelets broke on my back and upon the raft at my chin with a little jabble of sound. But it blew upon the leaves of the branch which acted as a sail and sent us so quickly northward that I had to swim sideways in order to keep in the right line of our voyaging.

The moon rose as we left the shallows of the shore. She looked coldly and blankly at us over the black Parton moors on the other side. But all the same she did us a mighty ill turn. For I knew that in her light the raft would be apparent to every one on the bank where the soldiers lay.

I dived instantly and came up on the side furthest from the land. There I held the raft so that the branch would keep its thickest cover towards the sentry.

I could see him now, pacing to and fro in the moonlight across the grey turf and strip of white sand. He was plain to be seen against the shining beach, and his helmet sometimes flashed momentarily against the dark line of the woods behind. So that I knew how plainly he in his turn must be able to see us, as we crossed the broad silver stream of moonlight upon the water.

A camp fire glowed sullenly red among the trees, from which I gathered that the commander of the soldiers was very much in earnest indeed, in his resolve to catch his man. For it was but seldom that any of the red soldiers would consent to lie out at night, preferring instead to quarter themselves upon the people, to harry their houses and gear, insult their women folk, and requiring to be called “your Honour” at every other word.

Meanwhile, the wind was doing its work, if not swiftly, at least with deliberate and unhalting steadiness. Mary sat like a statue under the green bough, and smiled at the dancing ripples. She looked very beautiful to see, aye, and winsome too, with my shirt-collar turned up about her ears and the empty sleeves hanging down on either side.

But I had small time to observe such like, for soon we were crossing the bright water in front of the soldier.

He had paced down to the water’s edge and now stood looking out towards us, leaning upon his musket. I could see the tails of his military coat blow back in the chill wind from the hills. He hugged himself as if he had been a-cold. Yet he stood looking so long that I feared he might suspect something. But after all it was only that he was a contemplative man, and that the object on the water was as good as anything else to fix his eyes upon. At any rate, all he did see was a floating branch being driven northward with the wind.

Presently, to my immense relief, he shouldered his piece and tramped away up towards the woods.

I drew a long breath, and swimming on my back I pushed the raft across the lake with my head.

Yet it seemed an age before we took ground on the further side, and I could carry the brave little maid ashore. She dropped almost instantly asleep on my shoulder.

“Have you given Matt his supper?” was her last speech. I thought Matt must be some pet dog of her’s. In time, however, I found that he was a certain green caterpillar which she kept in a wooden box and fed upon cabbage leaves.

After this there came a long and weary tramp with many rests, and the infinite weariness of carrying the sleeping maid. She grew heavier and heavier every moment as I stumbled over the rough moor, so that my back was well nigh broken before I came to the verge of the little lake with the tower of Lochinvar in the midst of it.

Here, in the dawning light, I laid her down under a bush of bog-myrtle, and swimming to the castle hand over hand I clamoured at the door.

For a time none answered, and I got a sharp, chilling fear in my stomach that I had brought the maid to a house uninhabited, but at long and last a window shot up and a voice hailed me.

“Who knocks so early at the door of Lochinvar?

“Who are you that speers?” I returned, giving question for question in the Scots manner.

A kindly mellow voice laughed.

“Surely only an honest country lad would have answered thus,” said the voice; “but since the times are evil, tell me who’s bairn ye may be?”

So with that, somewhat reassured, I told very briefly for what cause I had come.

The window shut down again, and in a few minutes I heard a foot within coming slowly along a stone passage. Bolts withdrew, and the door was opened, creaking and squealing upon unaccustomed hinges.

A pleasant-faced old lady, wrapped about in a travelling cloak of blue frieze, stood there. She had a white nightcap on her head, frilled and goffered much more elaborately than my mother’s at Ardarroch.

“Ye have brought Sandy Gordon’s daughter to me. Her faither and her mother are taken, ye tell me. God help them!” she exclaimed.

So I told her that I knew not as to her father’s taking with any certainty, for he might have been slain for aught I knew. I told her also the terrible thing I had been witness to on the top of Bennan, and the word of the lad in brown when he cried for Margaret. She set her hand to her heart.

“Poor lads,” she said, and again, “poor misguided lads!”

I thought in my heart that that was a strange way to speak of the martyrs, but it was not for a boy like me to make any objection.

The woman undid the boat which swung by a chain at the northern side of the castle secure within a little breakwater of hewn stone. We rowed across to the loch’s edge, and there, in the first ruddy glow of the rising sun, with colour on her lips and her lashes lying long and dark upon her cheek, was the little Mistress Mary, safe under her bush of bog-myrtle, looking lovely as a fairy, aye, or the queen of the fairies herself.

Then I know not what cantrip took me, for at most times, both then and after, I was an awkward Scots boy, as rough and landward as Ashie or Gray, my questing collies. But certain it is that I stooped and kissed her on the cheek as she lay, and when I lifted her would have given her to her aunt.

But she stirred a little as I took her in my arms, and with a little petulant whimper she nestled her head deeper into my neck. My heart stirred strangely within me at the touch of the light curls on her forehead.

She opened her eyes of sleepy blue. “Has Matt had his breakfast?” she said. And instantly fell to the sleeping again.

We laid her all comfortably in the stern of the boat. Her aunt stepped in and took the oars. She did not invite me to follow.

“Good morrow, lad,” she said, not unkindly, “get you home speedily. I will see to the child. You have done well by Sandy’s bairn. Come and see her and me in happier times. I promise you neither she nor I will ever forget it.”

And I watched these two as the boat went from me, leaving three long wakes upon the water, one oily and broad where the keel stirred the peaty water, and two smaller on either side winking with bubbles where the oars had dipped.

And there in the stern I could just see the edge of the blue hood of frieze, wherein lay the golden head of Mary Gordon.

She was but a bairn. What did a grown laddie care for bairns? Yet was my heart heavy within me.

And that was the last I saw of Mary Gordon for many and many a year.

CHAPTER VII.
MY BROTHER HOB.

The years which took me, Quintin MacClellan, from the boyishness of thirteen to eighteen and manhood were eventful ones for Scotland. The second Charles had died just when the blast was strongest, and for a while it looked as if his brother would be the worst of the two. But because he wished well to the Papists, and could not ease them without also somewhat benefiting us of the Covenant, the bitterness of the shower slacked and we had some peace.

But, as for me, it mattered not greatly. My heart within me was determined that which it should do. Come storm or peaceful years, come life or death, I was determined to stand in the forefront and hold up again the banner which had been dabbled in the blood of Richard Cameron at Ayrsmoss, and trailed in the dust of victory by the haughty and the cruel.

That very year I went to my father, and I asked of him a wage to be spent in buying me books for my learning.

“You want to be a minister?” said my father, looking, as he well might, no little astonished. “Have you gotten the grace of God in your heart?”

“Nay, father,” I answered him, “that I know not. But nevertheless I have a desire to know and to learn——”

But another voice cut into the matter and gravity of our discourse.

“Bless the lad, and so you shall, Quintin!” cried my mother from the door.

I heard my father sigh as though he would have said, “The fat is in the fire now!” Yet he refrained him and said nothing, standing as was his custom with his hands deep in the long side flaps of his waistcoat. Then he showed how hard it was to become a minister, and ever my mother countered his objections, telling how such-an-one’s son had gone forward and been successful.

“And they had none such a comfortable down-sitting nor yet any such blessing in flocks and herds as you, goodman!” she would say.

“Nor yet a mother so set and determined in her own way!” cried my father a little sharply.

“Nay, now, John,” she made answer; “I did but mention those other lads, because not one of them is to be compared with our Quintin!”

My father laughed a little.

“Well,” he said, “at all events there is time enough. The lad is but fourteen, and muckle much good water will run under the brigs ere it be time to send him to the college. But I will speak to Gilbert Semple, the Edinburgh carrier, to ask his cousin, the goodly minister, what books are best fitted for a lad who desires to seek learning and college breeding. And in the meantime the laddie has aye his Bible. I mind what good Master Rutherford said when he was in Anwoth: ‘If so be ye want manners e’en read the Bible. For the Bible is no ill-bred book. It will take you unashamed through an earthly court as well as through the courts of the Master of Assemblies, through the Star Chamber as well as through the chamber of the stars.’”

And though at the time I understood not well then what my father meant, yet I read in my Bible as I had opportunity, keeping it with one or two other books in the poke-nook of my plaid whenever I went to the hills. After a while Gilbert Semple, the carrier, brought me from Edinburgh certain other volumes—some of Latin and Greek grammar, with one or two in the mathematics which were a sore puzzle and heartbreak to me, till there came among us one of the Hill Folk, a well-learned man, who, being in hiding in a Whig’s hole on the side of Cairn Edward, was glad for the passing of the time to teach me to thread the stony desolation of verbs irregular and the quags of the rules of syntax.

Nevertheless, at this time, I fear there was in me no very rooted or living desire for the ministry. I longed, it is true, for a wider and more ample career than the sheep-herding on the hills of Kells could afford. And in this my mother supported me. Hob and David also, though they desired not the like for themselves, yet took some credit in a brother who had it in him to struggle through the narrow and thorn-beset wicket gate of learning.

Many a time did our great, stupid, kindly, butter-hearted Hob come to me, as I lay prone kicking my heels to some dyke-back with my Latin grammar under my nose, and stand looking over with a kind of awe on his honest face.

“Read us a bit,” he would say.

Whereat very gladly I would screed him off half a page of the rules of the syntax in the Latin tongue, according to the Dutch pronunciation which the preacher lad of the Cairn Edward cave had taught me.[3]

And as I rolled the weighty and sounding words glibly off, Hob would listen with an air of infinite satisfaction, like one that rolls a sweet morsel under his tongue.

“Read that leaf again! It’s a grand-soundin’ ane that! Like ‘And the Lord said unto Moses’ in the Book of Exodus. Certes, what it is to have learning!”

Then very gravely I would read to the foot of the page and stop.

Hob would stand a moment to digest his meal of the Humanities.

“Lie ye there, laddie,” he would say; “gather what lear ye can out of your books. I will look to the hill sheep for you this day!”

I shall never forget his delight when, after great wrestlings, I taught him the proper cases of Penna, “a pen,” which in time he attained so great a mastery over that even in his sleep he could be heard muttering, “Penna, a pen; pennae, of a pen.” And our David, slinking sulkily in at a wolf-lope from his night-raking among the Glenkens lasses, would sometimes bid him to be silent in no kindly tones, at which the burly Hob, who could have broken slender David over his knee, would only grunt and turn him over, recommencing monotonously under his breath, “Penna, a pen!”

My father smiled at all this—but covertly, not believing, I think, that there was any outgate for me into the ministry. And with the state of things in Scotland, indeed, I myself saw none. Nevertheless, I had it in me to try. And if Mr. Linning, Mr. Boyd, Mr. Shields, Mr. Renwick and others had gotten their learning in Holland, why should not I?

In return for Penna, a pen (pennae, of a pen, et cetera), Hob taught me the use of arms, the shooting to the dot of an “i” with a gun and a pistol, the broad sword and the small sword, having no mercy on me at all, but abusing me like a sheep-stealer if I failed or grew slack at the practice.

“For,” he said, “if ever you are to be a right minister in Scotland, it is as like that ye will need to lead a charge with Richard Cameron, as that ye will spend all your time in the making of sermons and delivering them.”

So he taught me also single-stick till I was black and blue all over. He would keep on so long belabouring me that I could only stop him with some verbal quib, which as soon as it pierced his thick skull would make him laugh so long and so loudly that the lesson stopped of itself. Yet for all that he had in after time the mighty assurance to say that it was I who had no true appreciation of humour.

One day, when he had basted me most unmercifully, I said to him, “I also would ask you one thing, Hob, and if you tell me without sleeping on it, I will give you the silver buckle of my belt.”

“Say on,” said he, casting an eager eye at the waist-leather which Jean Gordon had sent me.

“Wherein have I the advantage over the leopard?” I asked him.

He thought it over most profoundly.

“I give it up,” he said at last. “I do not know.”

“Why,” said I, as if it had been the simplest thing, “because when I play back-sword with you I can change my spots and Scripture declares that the leopard cannot.”

This he understood not at the time, but the next Sabbath morning it came upon him in the time of worship in the kitchen, and in the midst of the solemnity he laughed aloud, whereat my father, much incensed, asked him what ailed him and if his wits had suddenly taken leave of him.

“It was our Quintin,” dithered Hob, tremulously trying to command his midriff; “he told me that when I played back-sword with him he could change his spots and that the leopard could not.”

“When said he that?” asked my father, with cold suspicion, for I had been sitting demure as a gib cat at his own elbow.

“Last Monday in the gloaming, when we were playing at back-sword in the barn,” said Hob.

“Thou great fool,” cried my father, “go to the hill breakfastless, and come not in till ye have learned to behave yourself in the time of worship.”

To which Hob responded nothing, but rose and went obediently, smothering his belated laughter in his broad bonnet of blue.

He was waiting for me after by the sheep-buchts, when I went out with a bicker of porridge under my coat.

“I am sore vexed to have made our father angry,” he said, “but the answer came upon me suddenly, and in truth it was a proper jest—for, of course, a leopard could not play back-sword.”

CHAPTER VIII.
THE MUSTER OF THE HILL FOLK.

Men who know the strange history of the later life of me, Quintin MacClellan, may wonder that the present narrative discovers so little concerning my changes of opinion and stresses of spiritual conflict. But of these things I have written in extension elsewhere, and those who desire more than a personal narrative know well where to find the recital of my difficulties, covenantings, and combatings for the cause.

For myself, the memory of the day on the Bennan top was more than enough, and made me a high Covenant man for life. So that when I heard how King James was fled and his son-in-law, William of Orange, landed I could not contain myself, but bade Hob and David to come with me and light a beacon-fire on the top of the Millyea, that fair and shapely mountain. This after severe labour we did, and they say that the light was seen over a dozen parishes.

Then there came word to the Glenkens that there was to be a Convention in Edinburgh of men chosen out of every shire and county, called and presided over by Duke Hamilton. But it was the bruit of the countryside that this parliament would turn out even as the others, and be ground under the heel of the old kingsmen and malignants.[4]

So about this time there came to see my father two men grave and grey, their beards blanched with dripping hill-caves and with sleeping out in the snell winds and biting frosts of many a winter, without better shelter than some cold moss-hag or the bieldy side of a snow wreath.

“There is to be a great rising of the Seven Thousand. The whole West is marching to Edinburgh!” cried in at the door the elder of the two—one Steel, a noted Covenanter from Lesmahago.

But the other, when his dark cloak blew back, showed a man of slender figure, but with a face of calm resolve and indomitable courage—the proven face of a soldier. He was in a fair uniform—that, as I afterwards found, of one of the Prince of Orange’s Scots-Dutch regiments.

“This,” said Steel to my father, “is Colonel William Gordon, brother of Earlstoun, who is come directly from the Prince of Orange to represent his cause in his own country of the West.”

In a moment a spark lighted in my heart, blazed up and leaped to my tongue.

“What,” I cried, “William Gordon—who carried the banner at Sanquhar and fought shoulder to shoulder with Cameron at Ayrsmoss.”

For it was my mother’s favourite tale.

The slender man with the calm soldier-like face smiled quietly and made me a little bow, the like of which for grace I had never seen in our land. It had so much of foreign habitude in it, mixed with a simple and personal kindliness native to the man.

“Ah,” he said, “I am ten years older since then—I fear me not ten years wiser.”

His voice sounded clear and pleasant, yet it was indubitably the voice of a man to be obeyed.

“How many sons and limber house-carles can you spare, Ardarroch,” said he, watching my father’s face, “to march with me to keep the Convention out of the clutches of my Lord Dundee?”

“Of the devil’s hound, Clavers, mean ye?” corrected my father suddenly, the fierce, rooted light of hatred gleaming keen and sharp, like the blade of a dagger which is drawn just an inch from its sheath and then returned. “There are three of us on the farm, besides the boy Quintin, my youngest son. And every one of them shall ride to Edinburgh with you on their own horses.”

“Four shall ride, father,” said I, stepping forward. “I am the youngest, but let me also strike a blow. I am as fit of my body as either Hob or David there, and have a better desire and goodwill than either of them.”

“But, lad,” said my father, not ill pleased, “there are your mother and sister to look after. Bide you here and take care of the house.”

“There needs none to take care of the house while ye leave us here with a musket or two and plenty of powder and lead,” cried my mother. “Anna and I shall be safer, aye, and the fuller of gladness that ye are all in Edinburgh doing the Lord’s work. Ride ye, therefore, all the four of you!”

“Yes,” added Anna, with the sweet stillness of her eye on the ground, “let Quintin go, father. None would harm us in all the countryside.”

“Indeed, I think so,” growled my father, “having John MacClellan to reckon with on our return.”

Whereat for very thankfulness I took the two women’s hands, and Colonel Gordon said, “Aye, Ardarroch, give the lad his will. In time past I had my share of biding by the house while my elders rode to battle, and I love the boy’s eagerness. He has in him the stuff of good soldiers.”

And for these words I could have kissed the feet of Colonel William Gordon. The muster was appointed to be at Earlstoun on the morrow, and immediately there befell at Ardarroch a great polishing of accoutrement and grinding of swords, for during the late troubles the arms had been searched for over and over again. So it befel that they were hidden in the thatch of outhouse roofs, wrapped in cloths and carried to distant sandhills to be buried, or laid away in the damp caves of the linns.

Yet by the time all was brought in we were armed none so ill. My father had first choice, and then we three lads drew lots for the other weapons. To me came the longest straw, and I took the musket and a broad-bladed dagger, because I knew that our madcap David had set his heart on the basket-hilted sword to swing by his side, and I saw Hob’s eyes fixed on the pair of excellent horse-pistols which my father had bought when the effects of Patrick Verner (called “the Traitor”) were sold in Dumfries.

At Earlstoun, then, we assembled, but not immediately at the great house—for that was presently under repair after its occupation by troops in the troubles—but at a farmhouse near by, where at the time were abiding Mistress Alexander Gordon and her children, waiting for the final release of her husband from Blackness Castle.

When it came to the point of our setting out, there came word from Colonel Gordon that no more than two of us were to go to Edinburgh on horseback, owing to the scarcity of forage in the city and the difficulty of stabling horses.

“Let us again draw lots!” said my father.

But we told him that there was no question of that, for that he and David must ride while Hob and I would march afoot.

“And if I cannot keep up with the best that our David can ride on Kittle Kate, I will drown myself in the first six-inch duck-pond upon the road to Edinburgh!” cried Hob MacClellan.

So we went down the green loaning of Ardarroch with the women’s tears yet wet upon our cheeks, and a great opening of larger hopes dominating the little hollow qualms of parting in our hearts. Wider horizons beckoned us on. Intents and resolves, new and strange, thrilled us. I for one felt for the first time altogether a man, and I said within my heart as I looked at the musket which my father carried for me across his saddle-bow in order that I might run light, “Gladly will I die for the sake of the lad whom I saw murdered on the Bennan top!”

CHAPTER IX.
I MEET MARY GORDON FOR THE SECOND TIME.

And when we arrived, lo! before the little white farm there was a great muster. My Lord Kenmure himself rode over to review us. For the Committee of Estates drawn together by the Duke Hamilton had named him as responsible for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright.

But that which was of greater interest to me than any commission or enrollment was the appearing of two women upon the doorstep of the cottage—the Lady of Earlstoun and her daughter Mary.

Now it is to be remembered that Alexander Gordon’s wife was a sister of Sir Robert Hamilton, the commander at Bothwell Brig—a man whose ungovernable temper, and genius for setting one man at variance with his fellow, had lost us Bothwell Brig and the life of many a brave lad of the hills. And Mary’s mother, Jean Hamilton, was like her brother in that somewhat pretentious piety which is of all things the most souring and embittering.

So that even my father said—good, honest man, that would speak ill of none all the days of his life: “If I had a wife like yon woman, I declare I would e’en turn Malignant and shoot her without warrant of law or benefit of clergy.”

Jean Gordon came down off the doorstep and stood in front of us four MacClellans, looking out upon us with her keen, black eyes, and seeming as it had been, ready to peck at us with her long nose, which was hooked like a parrot’s in the middle.

“Have any of you paid the King’s cess,[5] or had any dealings with the malignants?” she said, speaking to us as to children taken in a fault.

“Not save along the barrel of a musket, my lady of Earlstoun!” quoth my father, drily.

The stern-visaged woman smiled at the ready answer.

“E’en stick to that, goodman of Ardarroch—it is the safest commerce with such ill-favoured cattle!” she said.

And with that she stepped further on to interrogate some newcomers who had arrived after us in the yard of the farm.

But indeed I minded her nothing. For there was a sweeter and fairer thing to see standing by the cheek of the door—even young Mary Gordon, the very maid I had once carried so far in my arms, now grown a great lass and a tall, albeit still slender as a year-old wand of willow by the water’s edges. Her hair, which had been lint white when I brought her down the side of Bennan after the shooting of the poor lad, was now darkening into a golden brown, with thick streaks of a warmer hue, ruddy as copper, running through it.

This girl leaned against the doorstep, her shapely head inclined a little sideways, and her profile clear and cold as the graving on a seal ring, turned away from me.

For my life I could not take my eyes off her.

“I, even I, Quintin MacClellan, have carried that girl in my arms and thought nothing of it!” I said the words over and over to myself, and somehow they were exceedingly pleasing to me.

I had ever sneered at love and love-making before, but (I own it) after seeing that fair young lass stand by the low entering in of the farmhouse door, I scoffed no more.

Yet she seemed all unconscious that I or any other was near her. But it came to me with power I could not resist, that I should make myself known to her. And though I expected nothing of remembrance, grace, or favour, yet—such is the force of compelling love, the love that comes at the first sight (and I believe in no other kind) that I put all my pride under my feet, and went forward humbly to speak with her, holding my bonnet of blue in my hand.

For as yet we of the Earlstoun levies had fallen into no sort of order, neither had we been drilled according to the rules of war, but stood about in scattering groups, waiting for the end of the conference between my Lord of Kenmure and Colonel William Gordon.

As I approached, awkwardly enough, the maid turned her eyes upon me with some surprise, and the light of them shone cold as winter moonlight glinting upon new-fallen snow.

I made my best and most dutiful obedience, even as my mother had showed me, for she was gentle of kin and breeding, far beyond my father.

“Mistress Mary,” I said, scarce daring to raise my eyes to hers, but keeping them fixed upon the point of my own rough brogans. “You have without doubt forgotten me. Yet have I never for an hour forgotten you.”

I knew all the while that her eyes were burning auger holes into me. But I could not raise my awkward coltish face to hers. She stood a little more erect, waiting for me to speak again. I could see so much without looking. Whereat, after many trials, I mustered up courage to go on.

“Mind you not the lad who brought you down from the Bennan top so long ago, and took you under cloud of night to the tower of Lochinvar on the raft beneath the shelter of beech leaves?”

I knew there was a kindly interest growing now in her eyes. But, dolt that I was, I could not meet them a whit the more readily because of that.

“I scarcely remember aught of it,” she said, “yet I have been told a hundred times the tale of your bringing me home to my aunt at Lochinvar. It is somewhat belated, but I thank you, sir, for your courtesy.”

“Nay,” said I, “’tis all I have to be thankful for in my poor life, that I took you safely past the cruel persecutors.”

She gave me a quick, strange look.

“Yet now do I not see you ready to ride and persecute in your turn?”

These words, from the daughter of Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun, who was scarcely yet liberate from the prison of Blackness, astonished me so much that I stood speechless.

“To persecute in my turn?” said I. “Nay, my dear mistress, I go to uphold the banner of Christ’s Kingdom against those that hate Him.”

Very scornfully she smiled.

“In my short life,” she said, “I’ve heard overmuch of such talk. I know to an ell how much it means. I have a mother, and she has friends and gossips. To me the triumph of what you call ‘the Kingdom’ means but two things—the Pharisee exalted and the bigot triumphant. Prince Jacob of Orange may supplant his father and take the crown; every canting Jack may fling away the white rose and shout for the Orange lily. But not I—not I?”

She flaunted a little white hand suddenly palm upward, like an apple blossom blown off the branch by the wind.

To say that I was astounded by this outbreak is to say little. It was like an earthquake, the trembling and resolving of solid land under my feet. Alexander Gordon’s child—“the Bull of Earlstoun’s” daughter—standing openly and boldly for the cause of those who had prisoned and, perhaps, tortured her father, and brought about the ruin of her house!

At last I managed to speak.

“You are a young maiden,” I said, as quietly as I could, “and you know nothing of the great occasions of state, the persecutions of twenty-five years, the blood shed on lonely hillsides, the deaths by yet wearier sickness, the burials under cloud of night of those who have suffered——!”

I would have said more, but that she prevented me imperiously.

“I know all there is to know,” she cried, almost insolently. “Have I not broken fast with it, dined with it, taken my Four-hours with it, supped with it ever since I was of age to hear words spoken? But to my thinking the root of the matter is that you, and those like you, will not obey the rightful King, who alone is to be obeyed, whose least word ought to be sufficient.”

“But not in religion—not in the things of conscience,” I stammered.

Again she waved her hand floutingly.

“’Tis not my idea of loyalty only to be loyal when it suits my whim, only to obey when obedience is easy and pleasant. The man whom I shall honour shall know nothing of such summer allegiance as that!”

She paused a moment and I listened intently.

“Nay,” she said, “he shall speak and I shall obey. He shall be my King, even as King James is the sovereign of his people. His word shall be sacred and his will law.”

There was a light of something like devout obedience in her eyes. A holy vestal flame for a moment lighted up her face. I knew it was useless to argue with her then.

“Nevertheless,” I answered very meekly, “at least you will not wholly forget that I brought you to a place of safety, sheltering you in my arms and venturing into dark waters for your sake!”

Now though I looked not directly at her, I could see the cold light in her eyes grow more scornful.

“You do well to remind me of my obligation. But do not be afraid; you shall be satisfied. I will speak of you to my father. Doubtless, when he comes home he will be great with the Usurper and those that bear rule under him. You shall be rewarded to the top of your desires.”

Then there rose a hot indignation in my heart that she should thus wilfully misunderstand me.

“You do me great wrong, my Lady Mary,” I answered; “I desire no reward from you or yours, saving only your kindly remembrance, nor yet any advancement save, if it might be, into your favour.”

“That,” she said, turning petulantly away, “you will never get till I see the white rose in your bonnet instead of those Whiggish and rebel colours.”

CHAPTER X.
THE BLUE BANNER IS UP.

Now though at first I was grievously astonished that the daughter of Alexander Gordon and his wife Janet Hamilton should so speak, yet when I come to consider further of the matter it appears noways so wonderful.

For her father, when I came to know him, showed himself a great, strong, kindly, hard-driving “nowt” of a man, with a spiritual conceit equal to his knowledge of his bodily powers. But, for all his great pretensions, Sandy Gordon was essentially a man carnal and of the world, ever more ready to lay on lustily with the arm of the flesh than trust to the sword of the Spirit.

The “Bull of Earlstoun” was he right fitly called.

And with his children his method of training would doubtless be “Believe this! Receive that other!” Debate and appeal there would be none. So there is nothing to wonder at in the revolt of a nature every whit as imperious as that of her father, joined to a woman’s natural whimsies and set within the periphery of a girl’s slender form.

And then her mother!

If Sandy Gordon had proved trying to such a mind as that of Mary Gordon, what of Janet Hamilton, his wife?

She had been reared in the strictest sect of the Extremists. Every breath of difference or opposition to her orthodoxies or those of her brother Sir Robert was held rank treason to the cause. She had constant visions, and these visions pointed ever to the cardinal truth that Janet Hamilton was eternally right and every one else eternally wrong.

So Alexander Gordon, as often as he was at home, bullied back and forth concerning Covenants and sufferings, while at other times his wife worried and yammered, bitter as the east wind and irritant as a thorn in the flesh, till the girl was driven, as it were, in self-defence into other and as intolerant extremes.

Yet when her parents were most angered with her for this perversity, some sudden pretty wile or quaint bairnliness would set them laughing in spite of themselves, or a loving word of penitence bring the tears into their eyes. And while she chose to be good Mary Gordon, the family rebel, the disgrace of a godly home, would be again their own winsome little May, with a smile as sweet as the Benediction after sermon on a summer Sabbath morn, when the lilac and the hawthorn blossom scent all the kirk.

But as for me, having had trial of none of these wiles and witchcrafts, I was grieved indeed to hear one so fair take the part of the cruel persecutors and murderers of our brethren, the torturers of her father, the men to whose charge could be laid the pillage and spoiling of the bonny house of Earlstoun, and the turning of her mother out upon the inclement pitilessness of a stormy winter.

But with old and young alike the wearing iteration of a fretful woman’s yammering tongue will oftentimes drive further and worse than all the clattering horses and pricking bayonets of persecution.

Yet even then I thought within me, “Far be it from me that I should ever dream of winning the heart of so fair and great a lady.” But if by the wondrous grace of God, so I ever did, I should be none afraid but that in a little blink of time she would think even as I did. And this was the beginning of the feeling I had for Mary Gordon. Yet being but little more than a shepherd lad from off the hills of heather she was to me almost as one of the angels, and I thought of her not at all as a lad thinks in his heart of a pretty lass, to whom one day if he prosper he may even himself in the way of love.

After a day or two at Earlstoun, spent in drilling and mustering, in which time I saw nothing more of Mary Gordon, we set off in ordered companies towards Edinburgh. The word had been brought to us that the Convention was in great need of support, for that Clavers (whom now they called my Lord Dundee) was gathering his forces to disperse it, so that every one of the true Covenant men went daily in fear of their lives.

Whereupon the whole Seven Thousand of the West and South were called up by the Elders. And to those among us who had no arms four thousand muskets and swords were served out, which were sent by the Convention to the South and West under cover of a panic story that the wild Irishers had landed and burnt Kirkcudbright.

Hob and I marched shoulder to shoulder, and our officer was of one name with us, one Captain Clelland, a young soldier of a good stock who in Holland had learnt the art of war. But Colonel William Gordon, the uncle of the lass Mary, commanded all our forces.

So in time we reached the brow of the hill of Liberton and looked northward towards the town of Edinburgh, reeling slantways down its windy ridge, and crowned with the old Imperial coronet of St. Giles where Knox had preached, while the castle towered in pride over all.

It was a great day for me when first I saw those grey towers against the sky. But down in the howe of the Grassmarket there was a place that was yet dearer—the black ugly gibbet whereon so many saints of God, dear and precious, had counted their lives but dross that they might win the crown of faithfulness. And when we marched through the West Port, and passed it by, it was in our heart to cheer, for we knew that with the tyrant’s fall all this was at an end.

But Colonel William Gordon checked us.

“Rather your bonnets off, lads,” he cried, “and put up a prayer!”

And so we did. And then we faced about and filed straight up into the town. And as the sound of our marching echoed through the narrows of the West Bow, the waiting faithful threw up their windows and blessed us, hailing us as their saviours.

Company after company went by, regular and disciplined as soldiers; but in the Lawmarket, where the great folk dwelt, there were many who peeped in fear through their barred lattices.

“The wild Whigs of the West have risen and are marching into Edinburgh!” so ran the cry.

We of Colonel Gordon’s Glenkens Foot were set to guard the Parliament House, and as we waited there, though I carried a hungry belly, yet I stood with my heart exulting proudly within me to see the downtrodden at last set on high and those of low estate exalted.

For the sidewalks and causeways of the High-street were filled with eager crowds, but the crown of it was kept as bare as for the passing of a royal procession. And down it towards Holyrood tramped steadily and ceaselessly, company by company, the soldiers of the Other Kingdom.

Stalwart men in grey homespun they were, each with his sword belted to him, his musket over his shoulder, and his store of powder and lead by his side. Then came squadrons of horses riding two and two, some well mounted, and others on country nags, but all of them steady in their saddles as King’s guards. And when these had passed, again company after company of footmen.

Never a song or an oath from end to end, not so much as a cheer along all the ranks as the Hill Men marched grimly in.

“Tramp! tramp! tramp!” So they passed, as if the line would never end. And at the head of each company the blue banner of Christ’s Covenant—the standard that had been trailed in the dust, but that could never be wholly put down.

Then after a while among the new flags, bright with silk and blazening, there came one tattered and stained, ragged at the edges, and pierced with many holes. There ran a whisper. “It is the flag of Ayrsmoss!”

And at sight of its torn folds, and the writing of dulled and blistered gold upon it, “For Christ’s Cause and Covenant,” I felt the tears well from the heart up to my eyes, and something broke sharply with a little audible cry in my throat.

Then an old Covenant man who had been both at Drumclog and the Brig of Bothwell, turned quickly to me with kindly eyes.

“Nay, lad,” he said, “rather be glad! The standard that was sunken in a sea of blood is cleansed and set up again. And now in this our day woe be to the persecutors! The banner they trailed in the dust behind the dripping head of Richard Cameron shall wave on the Nether Bow of Edinburgh, where the corbies picked his eyes and his fair cheeks blackened in the sun.”

And so it was, for they set it there betwixt the High-street and the Canongate, and from that day forth, during all the weeks of the Convention, the Covenant men held the city quiet as a frighted child under their hand.

CHAPTER XI.
THE RED GRANT.

It was while we continued to sojourn in Edinburgh for the protection of the Convention that first I began to turn my mind to the stated ministry of the Kirk, for I saw well that this soldiering work must ere long come to an end. And yet all my heart went out towards something better than the hewing of peats upon the moor and the foddering of oxen in stall.

Yet for long I could not see how the matter was to be accomplished, for the Cameronian hill-folk had never had a minister since James Renwick bade his farewell to sun and moon and Desirable General Meetings down in the Edinburgh Grassmarket. There was no authority in Scotland capable of ordaining a Cameronian minister. I knew how impossible it was that I could go to Holland, as Renwick and Linning and Shields had done, at the expense of the societies—for the way of some of these men had even now begun to sour and disgust the elders of the Hill Folk.

So since no better might be I turned my mind to the ministry of the Reformed Kirk as it had been established by law, and resolved to spend my needful seasons as a student of the theologies in the town of Edinburgh. I spoke to my father of my decision, and he was willing that I should try the work.

“I will gladly be at your college charges, Quintin,” he said; “but mind, lad, it will depend how I sell my sheep, whether ye get muckle to put in your belly. Yet, perchance, as the auld saw hath it, ‘hungry dogs hunt best,’ So mayhap that may likewise hold true of the getting of learning.”

So in the autumn of that year of the Convention, and some months after our return, I made me ready to go to college, and to my infinite surprise Hob, my brother, declared that he would come also.

“For,” said he, “my father does not need me now at home, at least, not till the spring and the lambing time.”

My father demurred a little. But Hob got his way because he had, as I well saw, my mother behind him. Now Hob was (and is) the best of brothers—slow, placid, self-contained, with little humour in him, but filled with a great, quiet faithfulness. And he has abode with me through many tears and stern trials.

So in due time to Edinburgh we twain went, and while I trudged it back and forth to the college Hob bought with his savings a pedlar’s pack, and travelled town and country with swatches of cloth, taches for the hair, pins for the dresses of women-folk, and for the men chap-books and Testaments. But the strange thing is that, slow and silent as our Hob is at most times, he could make his way with the good wives of the Lothians as none of those bred to the trade could do. They tell me he was mightily successful.

I only know that many a day we two might have gone hungry to bed had it not been for what Hob brought home, instead of, as it was, having our kites panged full with good meat, like Tod Lowrie when the lambs are young on the hill.[6]

And often when my heart was done with the dull and dowie days, the hardness of my heart, and the wryness of learning, Hob would come in with a lightsome quirk on his queer face, or a jest on his tongue, picked up in some of the outlying villages, so that I could not help but smile at him, which made the learning all the easier afterward.

Yet the hardest part of my sore toil at college was the thought that the more I travailed at the theologies, the less of living religion was in my soul. Indeed, it was not till I had been back some time among the common folk who sin and die and are buried, that I began again to taste the savour of vital religion as of old. For to my thinking there is no more godless class than just the young collegers in divinity. Nor is this only a mock, as Hob would have made of it, saying with his queer smile, “Quintin, what think ye o’ a mission to the heathen divinity lads—to set the fire o’ hell to their tails, even as Peden the Prophet bade Richie Cameron do to the border thieves o’ Annandale?”

Connect and Addition to Chapter XI. made in after years by Me, Hob MacClellan.

It is well seen from the foregoing that Quintin, my brother, had no easy time of it while he was at the college, where they called him “Separator,” “Hill Whig,” “Young Drumclog,” and other nicknames, some of which grieved the lad sore.

Now they were mostly leather-jawed, slack-twisted Geordies from the Hieland border that so troubled our Quintin—who, though he was not averse to the sword or the pistol in a good cause, yet would not even be persuaded to lift his fist to one of these rascals, lest it should cause religion to be spoken against. But I was held by none of these scruples.

So it chanced that one night as we came out of the College Wynd in the early falling winter gloaming, one of these bothy-men from the North called out an ill name after us—“porridge-fed Galloway pigs,” or something of the kind. Whereat very gladly I dealt him so sound a buffet on the angle of his jaw that his head was not set on straight again all the winter.

After this we adjourned to settle our differences at the corner of the plainstones; but Quintin and the other theologians who had characters to lose took their way home, grieved in spirit. Or so at least I think he pretended to himself.

For when I came in to our lodging an hour after his first words were: “Did ye give him his licks, Hob?” And that question, to which I answered simply that I had and soundly, did not argue that the ancient Adam had been fully exorcised from our Quintin.

All the same the Highlandman was none so easy to handle, being a red-headed Grant from Speyside, and more inclined to come at you with his thick skull, like a charging boar of Rothiemurchus, than decently to stand up with the brave bare knuckles, as we are wont to do in the South.

A turn or two at Kelton Hill fair would have done him no harm and taught him that he must not fight with such an ungodly battering-ram as his head. I know lads there who would have met him on the crown with the toe of their brogans.

But this I scorned, judging it feater to deal him a round-arm blow behind the ear and leap aside. The first of these discouraged the Grant; the second dropped him on the causeway dumb and limp.

“Well done, Galloway!” cried a voice above; “but ye shall answer for this the morn, every man o’ ye!”

“Run, lads, run! ’Tis the Regent!” came the answering cry from the collegers.

And with that every remaining student lad ran his best in the direction of his own lodging.

“Well, sir, have ye killed the Speyside Hielandman?” said the Doctor from his window, when I remained alone by the fallen chieftain. The Regent came from the West himself, and, they say, bore the Grants no love, for all that he was so holy a man.

“I think not,” I answered doubtfully, “but I’ll take him round to the infirmary and see!”

And with that I hoisted up the Red Grant on my shoulders, carried him down the Infirmary Close, and hammered on the door till the young chirurgeon who kept the place, thinking me to be drunk, came to threaten me with the watch.

Then, the bolts being drawn, I backed the Highlandman into the crack of the door and discharged him upon the floor.

“There’s a heap of good college divinity,” I said. “The Regent sent me to bid ye find out if he be dead or alive.”

So with no more said we got him on a board, and at the first jag of the lancet my Grant lad sat him up on end with a loup like a Jack-in-the-box. But when he saw where he was, and the poor bits of dead folk that the surgeon laddies had been learning on that day, he fetched a yell up from the soles of his Highland shoon, and bounced off the board, crying, “Ye’ll no cut me up as lang as Donald Grant’s a leeving man, whatever ye may do when he’s dead!”

And so he took through the door as if the dogs had been after him.

Then the blood-letting man was for charging me with the cost of his time, but I bade him apply to Regent Campbell over at the college, telling him that it was he who had sent me. But whether ever he did so or not I never heard.

Now the rarest jest of the whole matter was on the morrow, when Quintin went to attend his prelection in Hall. The lesson, so he told me, was in the Latin of Essenius, his Compend, and Quintin was called up. After he had answered upon his portion, and well, as I presume, for Quintin was no dullard at his books, Dr. Campbell looked down a little queerly at him.

“Can you tell me which is the sixth commandment?” says he.

“Thou shalt not kill!” answers Quintin, as simple as supping brose.

“Then, are you a murderer or no—this morning?”

Quintin, thinking that, after the fashion of the time, the Regent meant some divinity quirk or puzzle, laid his brains asteep, and answered that as he had certainly “hated his brother,” in that sense he was doubtless, like all the rest of the human race, technically and theologically a murderer.

“But,” said the Professor, “what of the Highland Grant lad that ye felled like a bullock yestreen under my window?”

Now it had never struck me that I was like my brother Quintin in outward appearance, save in the way that all we black MacClellans are like one another—long in the nose, bushy in the eyebrows, which mostly reach over to meet one another. And I grant it that Quintin was ever better mettle for a lass’s eye than I—though not worth a pail of calf’s feed in the matter of making love as love ought to be made, which counts more with women than all fine appearings.

But for the nonce let that fly stick to the wall; at any rate, sure it is that the Professor loon had taken me for Quintin.

Now it will greatly help those who read this chronicle to remember what Quintin did on this occasion. I would not have cared a doit if he had said, in the plain hearing of the class, that it was his brother Hob the Lothian packman who had felled the Red Grant.

But would the lad betray his brother? No! He rather hung his head, and said no more than that he heard the Red Grant was not seriously hurt. For as he said afterwards, “I did not know what such a tribe of angry, dirked Highlandmen might have done to you, Hob, if they had so much as guessed it was no colleger’s fist which had taken Donald an inch beneath the ear.

“Then,” said the Regent to Quintin, “my warrior of Wild Whigdom, you may set to the learning of thirty psalms by heart in the original Hebrew. And after you have said them without the book I will consider of your letters of certification from this class.”

To which task my brother owes that familiarity with the Psalms of David which has often served him to such noble purpose—both when, like Boanerges, he thundered in the open fields to the listening peoples, and when at closer range he spoke with his enemies in the gate. For thirty would not suit this hungrisome Quintin of ours. He must needs learn the whole hundred and fifty (is it not?) by rote before he went back to the Regent.

“Which thirty psalms are ye prepared to recite?” queried the Professor under the bush of his eyebrows.

“Any thirty!” answered brave Quintin, unabashed, yet noways uplifted.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Now the rest of my brother’s college life may be told in a word. I know that he had written many chapters upon his struggles and heart-questionings as to duty and guidance at that time. But whether he destroyed them himself, or whether they exist in some undiscovered repository, certain it is that the next portion of his autobiography which has come into my hands deals with the time of his settlement in the parish of Balmaghie, where he was to endure so many strange things.

It is enough to say that year after year Quintin and I returned to the college with the fall of the leaf, I with my pack upon my back, ever gaining ready hospitality because of the songs and merry tales in my wallet. When we journeyed to and fro Quintin abode mostly at the road-ends and loaning-foots while I went up to chaffer with the good-wives in the hallans and ben-rooms of the farmhouses. Then, in the same manner as at first, we fought our way through the dull, iron-grey months of winter in Auld Reekie. Each spring, as the willow buds furred and yellowed, saw us returning to the hill-farm again with our books and packs. And all the while I kept Quintin cheerful company, looking to his clothes and mending at his stockings and body-gear as he sat over his books. Mainly it was a happy time, for I knew that the lad would do us credit. And as my mother said many and many a time, “Our Quintin has wealth o’ lear and wealth o’ grace, but he hasna as muckle common-sense as wad seriously blind a midge.”

So partly because my mother put me through a searching catechism on my return, and also because I greatly loved the lad, I watched him night and day, laid his clothes out, dried his rig-and-fur hose, greased his shoon of home-tanned leather to keep out the searching snow-brew of the Edinburgh streets. For, save when the frost grips it, sharp and snell, ’tis a terrible place to live in, that town of Edinburgh in the winter season.

Here begins again the narrative of Quintin my
brother.

CHAPTER XII.
THE LASS IN THE KIRKYARD.

I had been well-nigh a year about the great house of Girthon as family chaplain to the laird, when there came a call to accept the ministry of the Gospel among the people of Balmaghie. It was a parish greatly to my mind. It lies, as all know, in the heart of Galloway, between the slow, placid sylvan stretches of the Ken and the rapid, turbulent mill-race of the Black Water of Dee.

From a worldly point of view the parish was most desirable. For though the income in money and grain was not great, nevertheless the whole amount was equal to the income of most of the smaller lairds in the neighbourhood.

Yet for all these things, I trust that those in future times who may read this my life record will acquit me of the sin of self-seeking.

I mind well the first time that I preached in the parish which was to be mine own. I had walked with naught but my Bible in my pocket over the long, lone hill-road from Girthon to Balmaghie. I had with me no provender to comfort my stomach by the way, or to speed my feet over the miles of black heather moors and green morass.

For the housekeeper, to whom (for reasons into which I need not enter) everything in the laird’s house of Girthon was committed, was a fair-faced, hard-natured, ill-hearted woman, who liked not the coming of a chaplain into the house—as she said, “stirring up the servants to gad about to preachings, and taking up their time with family worship and the like foolishness.”

So she went out of her way to ensure that the chaplains would stay only until they could obtain quittance of so bare and thankless a service.

When I arrived at the kirk of Balmaghie, having come all the long journey from Girthon on foot and fasting, I sat me down on a flat stone in the kirkyard, near by where the martyrs lie snug and bieldy at the gable-end.

So exhausted was I that I know not what I should have done but for a young lass, comely and well put on, who gave me the farle of oatcake she had brought with her for her “morning.”

“You are the young minister who is to preach to us this day?” she said, going over to the edge of the little wood which at that time bounded the kirkyard.

I answered her that I was and that I had walked all the way from the great house of Girthon that morning—whereat she held up her hands in utter astonishment.

“It is just not possible,” she cried.

And after pitying me a long time with her eyes, and urging me to eat her “piece” up quickly, she featly stooped down to the water and washed her feet and ankles, before drawing upon them a pair of white hosen, fair and thin, and fastening her shoes with the buckles of silver after a pretty fashion which was just coming in.

It was yet a full hour and a half before the beginning of the morning diet of worship, for I had risen betimes and travelled steadily. Now the kirk of Balmaghie stands in a lonely place, and even the adjoining little clachan of folk averts itself some distance from it.

Then being hungry I sat and munched at the lass’s piece, till, with thinking on my sermon and looking at her by the waterside, I had well-nigh eaten it every snatch. So when I awoke from my reverie, as from a deep sleep, I sat with a little bit of bread, the size of my thumb, in my hand, staring at it as if I had seen a fairlie.[7]

And what was worse, the lass seeing me thus speechless, and with my jaws yet working on the last of the crust, went off into peal after peal of laughter.

“What for do ye look at me like that, young lad?” she said, when she had sufficiently commanded herself.

“I—I have eaten all your midday piece, whiles I was thinking upon my sermon,” I said.

“More befitting is it that you should think upon your sermon than of things lighter and less worthy,” said she, without looking up at me. I was pleased with her solid answer and felt abashed.

“But you will go wanting,” I began.

She gartered one shapely stocking of silk ere she answered me, holding the riband that was to cincture the other in her mouth, as appears to be the curious fashion of women.

“What matter,” she said, presently, as she stroked down her kirtle over her knee modestly, with an air that took me mightily, it was so full of distance and respect. “I come not far, but only from the farm town of Drumglass down there on the meadow’s edge. Ye are welcome to the bit piece; I am as glad to see ye eat it as of a sunny morn in haytime. You have come far, and a brave day’s wark we are expecting from you this Sabbath day.”

Then, as was my duty, I rebuked her for looking to man for that which could alone come from the Master and Maker of man.

She listened very demurely, with her eyes upon the silver buckles of her shoon, which she had admiringly placed side by side on the grass, when she set herself down on the low boundary wall of the kirkyard.

“I ken I am too young and light and foolish to be fit company even for a young minister,” she said, and there was a blush upon her cheek which vexed me, though it was bonny enough to look upon.

“Nay,” answered I quickly; “there you mistake me. I meant no such thing, bonnie lass. We are all both fond and foolish, minister and maid.” (Well might I say it, for—God forgive me!—at that very moment my mind ran more on how the lass looked and on the way she had of tapping the grass with her foot than on the solemn work of the day.)

“No, no,” she interrupted, hastily; “I am but a silly lass, poor and ignorant, and you do well to fault me.”

Now this put me in a painful predicament, for I still held in my hand the solitary scraplet left of the young lass’s “piece,” and I must needs, like a dull, splenetic fool, go on fretting her for a harmless word.

She turned away her head a little; nevertheless, I was not so ill-learned in the ways of maids but that I could see she was crying.

“What is your name, sweet maid?” I asked, for my heart was wae that I had grieved her.

She did not answer me till she had a little recovered herself.

“Jean Gemmell,” she said, at last, “and my father is the tenant of Drumglass up by there. He is an elder, and will be here by kirk-time. The session is holding a meeting at the Manse.”

I had pulled a Bible from my pocket and was thinking of my sermon by this time.

Jean Gemmell rose and stood a moment picking at a flower by the wall.

“My father will be on your side,” she said, slowly.

“But,” cried I, in some astonishment, “your father has not yet heard me preach.”

“No more have I,” she made answer, smiling on me with her eyes, “but, nevertheless, my father will be on your side.”

And she moved away, looking still very kindly upon me.

I cannot tell whether or no I was helped by this rencounter in my conduct of the worship that day in the parish kirk of Balmaghie. At any rate, I went down and walked in the meadows by the side of Dee Water till the folk gathered and the little cracked bell began to clank and jow from the kirk on the hill.

CHAPTER XIII.
MY LADY OF PRIDE.

Within the kirk of Balmaghie there spread from gable to gable a dim sea of faces, men standing in corners, men holding by windows, men peering in at the low doorway, while the women cowered upon folded plaids, or sat closely wedged together upon little creepie stools. So great a multitude had assembled that day that the bairns who had no voice in the ministerial call were in danger of being put without to run wild among the gravestones. But this I forbade, though I doubt not many of the youthful vagabondage would have preferred such an exodus to the hot and crowded kirk that day of high summer.

I was well through my discourse, and entering upon my last “head,” when I heard a stir at the door. I paused somewhat markedly lest there should be some unseemly disturbance. But I saw only a great burly red-bearded gentleman with his hair a little touched with grey. The men about the porch made room for him with mighty deference.

Clinging to his arm was a young girl, with a face lily-pale, dark eyes and wealth of hair. And instead of the bare head and modest snood of the country maid, or the mutch of the douce matron, there was upon the lady’s head a brave new-fashioned hat with a white feather.

I knew them in a moment—Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun and his daughter Mary.

I cannot tell if my voice trembled, or whether I showed any signs of the abounding agitation of my spirit. But certain it is that for a space, which to me seemed ages, the course of my thought went from me. I spoke words idle and empty, and it was only by the strongest effort of will that I recalled myself to the solemn matters in hand. That this should have happened in my trial sermon vexed me sore. For at that time I knew not that these disturbances, so great-seeming to the speaker, are little, if at all, observed by his hearers, who are ever willing to lay the blame upon their own lack of comprehension rather than upon their instructor’s want of clearness.

But the moment after, with a strong uprising of my spirit, I won above the turmoil of my intellects, and ended with a great outgoing of my heart, charging those before me to lay aside the evils of their life and enter upon the better way with zeal and assured confidence.

And seeing that the people were much moved by my appeal I judged wise to let them go with what fire of God they had gotten yet burning in their hearts. I closed therefore quickly, and so dismissed the congregation.

Then, when I came down to go from the kirk, the people were already dispersing. The great red-bearded man came forward and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Young sir,” he said, “it is true that ye have left the hill-folk, and with your feet have walked in devious ways. Notwithstanding, if what we have heard to-day be your message, we shall yet have you on your knees before the Eldership of the Societies. For the heart of the man who can thus speak is with us of the wilderness, and not among the flesh-pots of an Erastian Egypt.”

At which I shook my head, not seeing how true his words were to prove, nor yet how soon the Kirk of Scotland was to bow the head, which hitherto had only bent to her heavenly Lord, to the sceptre of clay and the rule of a feckless earthly monarch.

But though I looked wistfully at Mary Gordon, and would have gone forward to help her upon her horse where it stood tethered at the kirk-liggate, she passed me by as though she had not seen me, which surely was not well done of her. Instead she beckoned a young man from the crowd in the kirkyard, who came forward with his hat in his hand and convoyed her to her horse with a privileged and courtly air. Then the three rode off together, Alexander Gordon turning about in his saddle and crying back to me in his loud, hearty manner, “Haste ye and come over to the Earlstoun, and we will yet show you the way across the Red Sea out of the Land of Bondage.”

And I was left standing there sadly enough, yet for my life I cannot tell why I should have been sad. For the folk came thronging about me, shaking me by the hand, and saying that now they had found their minister and would choose me in spite of laird or prince or presbytery. For it seems that already some of my sayings had given offence in high quarters.

Yet it was as if I heard not these good folk, for (God forgive me) even at that solemn moment my thoughts were circling about that proud young lass, who had not deigned me a look even in the hour of triumph, but had ridden so proudly away with the man who was doubtless her lover.

Thus I stood awhile dumbly at gaze, without finding a word to say to any. And the folk, thinking that the spirit of the spoken Word was yet upon me, drew off a little.

Then there came a voice in mine ear, low and persuasive, that awoke me from my dream.

“This is my father, who would bid ye welcome, and that kindly, to his house of Drumglass.”

It was the young maid whose piece I had eaten in the morning.

The feeling in my heart that I had been shamed and slighted by Mary Gordon made Mistress Jean Gemmell’s word sweet and agreeable to me. I turned me about and found myself clasping the hands of a rugged old man with a broad and honest face, who took snuff freely with one hand, while he shook mine with the other.

“I’m prood to see ye, young sir,” he said, “prood to see ye! My dochter Jean here, a feat and bonny bit lass, has telled me that I am to gie ye my guid word. And my guid word ye shall hae. And mony o’ the elders and kirk-members owes siller to auld Drummie; aye, aye, and they shall do as I say or I shall ken the reason——”

“But, sir,” I said hastily, “I desire no undue influence to be used. Let my summons, if it come, be the call of a people of one mind concerning the fitting man to have the oversight of them in the things of the spirit.”

“Of one mind!” exclaimed the old man, taking snuff more freely than ever. “Ye are dootless a maist learned and college-bred young lad, with rowth o’ lear and lashin’s o’ grace, but ye dinna ken this pairish o’ Balmaghie if ye think that ye can ever hae the folk o’ wan mind. Laddie, the thing’s no possible. There’s as mony minds in Balmaghie as there’s folk in it. And a mair unruly, camsteery pairish there’s no between Kirkmaiden and the wild Hieland border. But auld Drummie can guide them—ow, aye, auld Drummie can work them. He can turn them that owes him siller round his finger, and they can leaven the congregation—hear ye that, young man!”

“If the people of this parish desire me for their minister, they will send me the call,” answered I, pointedly. For these things, as I have ever believed, are in a Higher Hand.

“Doubtless, doubtless,” quoth auld Drummie; “but the Balmaghie folk are none of the waur o’ a bit spur in their flank like a reesty[8] powny that winna gang. They mind a minute’s jag frae the law mair nor the hale grace o’ God for a month, and mind ye that! Gin ye come amang us, lad, I’ll learn ye a trick or twa aboot the folk o’ Balmaghie that ye will be the wiser o’. Mind, I hae been here a’ my life, and an elder o’ the kirk for thirty year!”

“I am much indebted, sir, for your good intentions, but——”

“Nae buts,” cried auld Drummie. “I hae my dochter Jean’s word that ye are a braw callan and deserve the pairish, and the pairish ye shall hae.”

“I am much indebted to your daughter,” I made answer. “She succoured me with bread to eat this morning, when in the kirkyard I was ready to faint with hunger. Without her kindness I know not how I would have come through the fatigues of this day’s exercises.”

“Ow, aye,” said the old man; “that’s just like my dochter Jean. And a douce ceevil lassock she is. But ye should see my ither dochter afore ye craw sae croose aboot Jean.”

“You have another daughter?” I said, politely.

“Aye,” he cried, with enthusiasm. “Man, where hae ye comed frae that ye haena heard o’ Alexander-Jonita, the lass wha can tame a wild stallion that horse-dealers winna tackle, and ride it stride-leg like a man. There’s no’ a maiden in a’ the country can hand a cannle to Alexander-Jonita, the dochter o’ Nathan Gemmell of Drumglass, in the pairish o’ Balmaghie.”

CHAPTER XIV.
THE TALE OF MESS HAIRRY.

So the service being ended for the day, I walked quietly over to Drumglass with Jean and her father. There I found a house well furnished, oxen and kine knee-deep in water, meadows, pastures, crofts of oats and bear in the hollows about the door, and over all such an air of bien and hospitable comfort that the place beckoned me to abide there.

Nathan Gemmell went beside me, regaling me with tales of the ancient days spoken in the broad and honourable sounding speech of the province.

“Hear ye, laddie,” he said, “gin ye come to the pairish o’ Balmaghie ye will need the legs o’ a racer horse, and the airms o’ Brawny Kim, the smith o’ Carlinwark. Never a chiel has been fit to be the minister o’ Balmaghie since Auld Mess Hairry died!

“He was a man—losh me, but he was a man!

“I tell ye, sir, this pairish needs its releegion tightly threshed into it wi’ a flail. Sax change-houses doon there hae I kenned oot o’ seven cot-houses at the Kirk-clachan o’ Shandkfoot, and a swearin’, drinkin’ set in ilka yin o’ them.

“And siccan reamin swatrochs of Hollands an’ French brandy, lad! Every man toomin’ his glass and cryin’ for mair, tossing it ower their thrapples hand ower fist, as hard as the sweatin’ landlords could open the barrels. And the ill words and the fechtin’—Lord, callant, ye never heard the like! They tell me that ye come frae the Kells. A puir feckless lot they are in the Kells! Nae spirit in their drink. Nae power or variety in their oaths and cursings!

“But Balmaghie!—-- That was a pairish in the old time, till Mess Hairry came in the days after John Knox. He had been a Papish priest some-gate till he had turned his cassock alang wi’ dour black Jock o’ the Hie Kirk o’ Edinburgh. But Mess Hairry they aye caa’ed him, for a’ that. And there were some that said he hadna turned that very far, but was a Papish as great as ever under the black Geneva gown!

“For he wad whiles gie them swatches o’ the auld ill-tongued Laitin, till the folk kenned na whether they werena bein’ made back again into limbs o’ Rome, and their leave never so much as speered.

“But Pope or reform, mass or sacrament, the pairish cared no a bursten chanter. Doon at the clachans the stark Hollands flowed like the water in a running spate, and the holy day o’ the Sabbath was their head time for the evil wark—that is, till Mess Hairry cam’, and oh, but he was the maisterfu’ man, as my auld grandfaither used to say. What did he?—man, I will tell ye. And let it be a lesson to ye, young man, gin ye come to the pairish o’ Balmaghie. The folk here like a tairgin’ maisterfu’ man. Hark ye to that! They canna bide chiels that only peep and mutter. The lads atween the waters o’ Dee and Ken tak’ a man maistly at his ain valuation, and if a minister thinks na muckle o’ himself—haith, they will e’en jaloose that he kens best, and no think muckle o’ him either!

“At ony rate, the drinking gaed on, as I was tellin’ ye, till yae day it cam’ to a head. There had been a new cargo brought into the Briggus—it was afore the days o’ the ill-set customs duties—foul fa’ them and the officers that wad keep a man frae brewin’ his decent wormfu’, or at least gar him tak’ the bother o’ doin’ it in the peat-stack or on some gairy-face instead o’ openly on his kitchen floor.

“But be that as it may, it was when Mess Hairry was at his fencing prayer in the kirk on a Sabbath, as it micht be on this day o’ June. He was just leatherin’ aff the words that fast the folk couldna tell whether he is giein’ them guid Scots or ill-contrived Laitin, when Mess Hairry stops and cocks his lug doon the kirk like a collie that hears a strange fit in the loanin’.

“The folk listens, too, and then they heard the ower word o’ a gye coarse sang from the clachan doon by, and the Muckle Miller o’ Barnboard, Black Coskery, leadin’ it wi’ a voice like the thunder on Knockcannon.

‘The deil cam up to oor loan en’
Smoored wi’ the reck o’ his black den,’

“There was nae mair sermon that day. Mess Hairry gied them but ae word. I wasna there, for I wasna born; but the granddaddy o’ me was then a limber loon, and followed after to see what wad befa’. ‘The sermon will be applied in the clachan this day in the name o’ God and the blessed saints,’ cried Mess Hairry.

“So the auld priest claught to him a great oak clickie stick he had brocht frae some enchanted wood, and doon the kirk road he linkit wi’ strides that were near sax foot frae tae to heel. Lord, but he swankit it that day.

“And ever as he gaed the nearer, louder and louder raise Barnboard’s chorus, ‘The deil he cam’ to our loan en’’—till ye could hear the verra window-frames dirl.

“But Mess Hairry he strode like the angel o’ destruction to the door o’ the first hoose. The bar was pushed, for it was sermon time, and they had that muckle respect. But the noise within was fearsome. Mess Hairry set the broad sole o’ his foot to the hasp, and, man, he drave her in as if she had been paper. It was a low door as a’ Galloway doors are. The minister dooked doon his heid, and in he gaed. Nane expected ever to see him come oot in life again, and a’ the folk were thinking on the disgrace that the pairish wad come under for killin’ the man that had been set over them in the things o’ the Lord. For bravely they kenned that Black Coskery wad never listen to a word o’ advice, but, bein’ drunk as Dauvid’s soo, wad strike wi’ sword, or shoot wi’ pistol as soon as drink another gill.

“There was an awesome pause after Mess Hairry gaed ben.

“The folk they stood aboot the doors and they held up their hands in peety. ‘Puir man,’ they said; ‘they are killin’ him the noo. There’s Black Coskery yellin’ at the rest to keep him doon and finish him where he lies. Puir man, puir man! What a death to dee, murdered in a change-hoose on the Lord’s Day o’ Rest, when he micht hae been by “Thirdly” in his sermon and clearin’ the points o’ doctrine wi’ neither tinker nor miller fashin’ him! This comes o’ meddlin’ wi’ the cursed drink.’

“Wilder and ever wilder grew the din. It was like baith Keltonhill Fair and Tongland Sacrament on a wet day. They had shut the doors when the priest gaed in to keep him close and do for him on the spot.

“My grand-daddy telled me that there was some ga’ed awa’ for the bier-trams and the mort-claiths to carry the corpse to the manse to be ready for his coffining!

“If they gang on like that there will no be enough left o’ him to hand thegither till they row him in his shroud! Hear till the wild renegades!

“And ever the thresh, thresh o’ terrible blows was heard, yells o’ pain an’ mortal fear.

“‘Mercy! Mercy! For the Lord’s dear sake, hae mercy!’

“The door burst frae its hinges and fell blaff on the road!

“‘They are bringin’ him oot noo. Puir man, but he will be an awesome sicht!’

“There cam’ a pour o’ men folk frae ’tween the lintels, some bareheaded, wi’ the red bluid rinnin’ frae aboot their brows, some wi’ the coats fair torn frae their backs—every man o’ them wild wi’ fear.

“‘They hae murdered him! Black Coskery has murdered him,’ cried the folk withoot. ‘And the ither lads are feared o’ the judgment for the bluid o’ the man o’ God.’

“But it wasna that—indeed, far frae that. For on the back o’ the men skailin’, there cam’ oot o’ the cot-hoose wha but Mess Hairry, and he had Black Coskery by the feet trailin’ him heid doon oot o’ the door. He flang him in the ditch like a wat dish-clout. Syne he gied his lang black coat a bit hitch aboot his loins wi’ a cord, like a butcher that has mair calves to kill. Then he makes for the next change-hoose. But they had gotten the warnin’. They never waited to argue, but were oot o’ the window, carrying wi’ them sash and a’—so they say.

“And so even thus it was wi’ the lave. The grace o’ God was triumphant in the Kirk Clachan o’ Ba’maghie that day.

“They took up a’ that was mortal o’ Black Coskery to the Barnboard on the bier they had gotten ready for the minister. He got better, but he was never the same man again; for whenever he let his voice be heard, or got decently fechtin’ drunk, some callant wad be sure to get ahint a tree and cry, ‘Rin, Coskery, here’s Mess Hairry.’ He couldna bide that, but cowered like a weel-lickit messan tyke.

“When they gaed into the first change-hoose, they say that the floor was a sicht to see. A’ thing driven to kindlin’ wood; for Mess Hairry had never waited to gie a word o’ advice, but had keeled ower Black Coskery wi’ ae stroke o’ his oak clickie on the haffets. Then, faith, he took the fechtin’ miller by the feet and swung him aboot his head as if he had been a flail.

“Never was there sic fechtin’ seen in the Stewartry. The men fell ower like nine-pins, and were richt glad to crawl to the door. But for a judgment on them it was close steekit, for they had shut it to be sure o’ Mess Hairry.

“They were far ower sure o’ him, and they say that if the hinges had no’ given way it micht hae been the waur for some o’ them.

“And that was the way that Mess Hairry preached the Gospel in Ba’maghie. Ow, it’s him that had the poo’er—at least, that’s what my granddaddy telled me.

“Ow, aye’ Ba’maghie needs a maisterfu’ man. But we’ll never see the like o’ Mess Hairry—rest his soul. He was indeed a miracle o’ grace.”

CHAPTER XV.
ALEXANDER-JONITA.

We had been steadily approaching the farm-steading of Drumglass, where it sits pleasantly under the hill looking down over the water-meadows, the while Nathan Gemmell told me his grandfather’s tale showing how a man ought to rule the parish of Balmaghie.

We had gotten almost to the door of the farm when we saw a horse and rider top the heathery fell to the left, and sweep down upon us at a tearing gallop.

The old man, hearing the clatter of stones, turned quickly.

“Alexander-Jonita!” he exclaimed, shaking his head with fond blame towards the daring rider, “I declare that lassie will break neck-bone some o’ thae days. And that will be seen!”

With dark hair flying in the wind, eyes gleaming like stars, short kirtle driven back from her knees by the rush of the horse’s stride, came a girl of eighteen or twenty on the back of a haltered but saddle-free mare.

Whether, as her father had boasted, the girl was riding astride, or whether she sat in the new-fangled way of the city ladies, I cannot venture to decide. For with a sharp turn of the hempen bridle she reined her beast within a few yards of us, and so had leaped nimbly to the ground before the startled senses could take in all the picture.

“Lassie,” cried the elder, with a not intolerant reproof in his tones, “where hae ye been that the kirk and the service of God saw ye not this day?”

The girl came fearlessly forward, looking me directly in the eyes. The reins were yet in her hand.

“Father,” she said, gently enough, but without looking at him, “I had the marches to ride, the ‘aval’ sheep to turn, the bitten ewes to dress with tar, the oxen to keep in bound, the horses to water; besides which, Jean wanted my stockings and Sunday gear to be braw the day at the kirk. So I had e’en to bide at hame!”

“Thing shame o’ yoursel’, Alexander-Jonita!” cried her father, “ye are your mither’s dochter. Ye tak’ not after the douce ways o’ your faither. Spite o’ a’ excuses, ye should hae been at the kirk.”

“Is this the young minister lad?” said Alexander-Jonita, looking at me more with the assured direct gaze of a man than with the customary bashfulness of a maid. Singularly fearless and forthlooking was her every glance.

“Even so,” said her father, “the lad has spoken weel this day!”

She looked me through and through, till I felt the manhood in me stir to vexation, not with shyness alone, but for very shame to be thus outfaced and made into a bairn.

She spoke again, still, however, keeping her eyes on me.

“I am no kirk-goer—no, nor yet great kirk-lover. But I ken a man when I see him,” said the strange maid, holding out her hand frankly. And, curiously enough, I took it with an odd sense of gratitude and comradeship.

“The kirk,” said I, “is not indeed all that it might be, but the kirk and conventicle alike are the gathering places of those that love the good way. We are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together.”

“Even so, minister!” she said, with some sudden access of gravity, “and this day I have been preaching the Gospel to the sheep and the oxen, the kye and the horse-beasts within the bounds of my parish, while ye spake your good word to human creatures that were maybe somewhat less grateful.”

“The folk to whom I spake had immortal souls,” said I, a little indignant to be thus bearded by a lassie.

“And how,” she retorted, turning on me quick as a fire-flash, “ken ye that the beasts have none, or that their spirit goeth downward into the earth? Have they not bodies also and gratitude? There was a sore distressed sheep this morning at Tornorrach that looked at me first with eyes that spake a prayer. But after I had cleansed and dressed the hurt, it breathed a benediction, sweet as any said in the Kirk of Balmaghie this day!”

“Nevertheless it was for men and women, perishing in sin, that Christ died!” I persisted, not willing to be silenced.

“How ken ye that?” she said; “did not the same Lord make the sheep on the hills and the kye in the byres? Will He that watches the sparrow fall think it wrong to lift a sheep out of a pit on the Sabbath? The Pharisees are surely not all dead to this day!”

“E’en let her alane, ye will be as wise,” said her father; “she has three words to every one that are given to men o’ sense. But she is withal a good lass and true of speech. Alexander-Jonita, stable your beast and come ben to wait on the minister in the ben room.”[9]

The girl moved away, leading her steed, and her father and I went on to the house of Drumglass.

When we entered the table was not yet set, and there were no preparations for a meal. Nathan Gemmell looked about him with a certain severe darkening expression, which told of a temper not yet altogether brought into obedience to the spirit.

“Jean—Jean Gemmell!” he cried, “come hither, lass!” He went and knocked loudly at the chamber door, which opened at one side of the kitchen.

“Wherefore have ye not set the table for the meal of meat?” he asked, frowning upon the maiden whom I had first seen. She stood with meek and smiling face looking at us from the lintel. Her face was shining and her hair very becomingly attired, though (as I observed) in a different fashion from what it had been in the morning by the kirk-gate when she gave me her piece to stay my hunger.

“I have been praying upon my knees for a blessing upon the work of this day in the kirk,” said Jean Gemmell, looking modestly down, “and I waited for Alexander-Jonita to help me to lay the table.”

“Were ye not vainly adoring your frail tabernacle? It seems more likely!” said her father, somewhat cruelly as I thought.

Then she looked once across at me, and her eyes filled with tears, so that I was vividly sorry for the maid. But she turned away from her father’s reproof without a word.

“We can well afford to wait. There is no haste,” I said, to ease her hurt if so I could; “this good kind maiden gave me all she had this morning in the kirk-yard, or I know not how I should have sped at the preaching work this day!”

Jean Gemmell paused half-way across the floor, as her father was employed looking out of the little window to catch a glimpse of Alexander-Jonita. She lifted her eyes again to mine with a look of sweet and tender gratitude and understanding which more than thanked me for the words I had spoken.

At that moment in came Alexander-Jonita with a free swing like some stripling gallant of high degree. I own that even at that time I liked to see her walk. She, at least, was no proud dame like—well, like one whose eyes abode with me, and the thought of whose averted gaze (God pardon me!) lay heavy about my heart when I ought to have been thinking of other and higher things.

Alexander-Jonita waited for no bidding, but after a glance which took in at once the empty board and Jean’s smooth dress and well-ordered hair, she hasted to spread a white cloth on the table, a coverture bleached and fine as it had been laundered for a prince’s repast. Then to cupboard and aumrie she went, bringing down and setting in order oaten bread, sour-milk scones of honest crispness, dried ham-of-mutton which she sliced very thin before serving—the rarest dainty of Galloway, and enough to make a hungry man’s mouth water only to think upon.

Then came in Jean Gemmell, who made shift to help daintily as she found occasion. But, listening over-closely to the converse of her father and myself, it chanced that she let fall a platter, which breaking, set her sister in a quick high mood. So that she ordered the lass to go and sit down while folk with hands did the work.

Now this somewhat vexed me, for I could see by the modest, covert way the girl glanced up at me as she set herself obediently down in the low window seat that her heart was full to the overflowing. Also something in the wild girl’s tone mettled me.

So I said to Jean across the kitchen, “Be of good cheer, maiden. There was one at Bethany who waited not, but yet chose the better part.”

“Aye,” cried Alexander-Jonita as she turned from the cupboard with a plate of butter, “say ye so? I ever kenned that you young ministers thought excellent things of yourselves, but I dreamed not that ye went as far as that.”

Whereat I blushed hotly, to think that I had unwittingly compared myself to One who sat with Martha and Mary in the house. And after that I was dumb before the sharp-tongued lass all the time of eating. But under the table Jean Gemmell put her hand a moment on mine, seeing me fallen silent and downcast.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE CORBIES AT THE FEAST.

Now when after all the call came for me to be placed minister of the parish, and I was placed there with the solemn laying on of the hands of the Presbytery, I thought in my folly as every young minister does, that the strivings of my life had come to an end. Whereas, had I known it, they were but beginning. For the soil was being fattened for the crop of troubles I was to harvest into a bitter garner ere many years had come and gone.

Strait and onerous were the charges the reverend brethren laid upon me. I had been of the Hill-folk in my youth. So more than once I was reminded. It might be that I was not yet purged of that evil taint. Earnestness in labour, sanctity of life, would not avail alone. I must keep me in subjection to the powers that be. I must purge myself of partial counsel and preach the Gospel in moderation—with various other charges which I pass over in silence.

Yet all the while I had the conceit within me that I knew better than these men could tell me what I had come to Balmaghie to perform. I minded me every day of the Bennan top and of the men that had been slain on the heather—specially on the poor lad in the brown coat. And I was noways inclined to be over-lenient with those who had wrought the damage, nor yet with those who had stood by with their hands in their pockets and whistled while the deed was being done.

After the ordination, as was the custom, there was a great dinner spread in a long tent set up by the Kirk Clachan of Shankfoot.

Here the Presbytery, the elders and such of the leading men of the parish as were free of scandal (few enough there were of these!) were entertained at the expense of the session.

One there was among the brethren who had watched me keenly all the day—Cameron, the minister of Kirkcudbright, an unctuously smiling man, but with a sidelong and dubious eye that could not meet yours. He had the repute of great learning, and was, besides, of highest consideration among the members, because he was reckoned to be the blood brother of the famous Richard Cameron, who died at Ayrsmoss in the year of 1680, and whether that were so or no, at least he did not deny it.

As for me, I talked mostly to a little wizened, hump-shouldered man, with a hassock of black hair which came down over his forehead, and great eyes that looked out on either side of a sharp hawk’s nose. A peeping, peering, birdlike man I found him to be—one Telfair of Rerrick, the great authority in the South Country on ghosts and all manifestations of the devil.

“Methinks the spirit of evil is once more abroad,” I heard Telfair say in a shrill falsetto to his next neighbour as they sat at meat. “Rerrick hath seen nothing like it since the famous affair of the Ringcroft visitation, so fully recounted in my little pamphlet—which, as you are aware, has run through several editions, not alone in Scotland, but also among the wise and learned folk of London. The late King even ordered a copy for himself, and was pleased to say that he had never read anything like it in all his life before; and by the grace of God he never would again. Was not that a compliment from so great a prince?”

“A compliment indeed,” cried Cameron of Kirkcudbright, nodding his head ironically, yet watching me all the time as I talked with Nathan Gemmell of Drumglass; “but what is this new portent?”

“’Tis but the matter of a bairn-child near the village of Orraland, which, as all the world knows, is the heart of my parish. A bairn, the son of very respectable folk, looking out upon the moon, had a vision of a man in red apparel cutting the moon in two with a sword of flame, whereat the child screamed and ran in to its mother to tell the marvel. And as soon as they came to me, I said: ‘There is that to be done to-day which shall cut the Kirk of God in twain within the bounds of this Presbytery.’”

“Truly a marvellous child, and of insight justly prophetic!” said Cameron, again nodding as he went about the ordering of his dinner and calling the waiting folk to be quick and set clean platters before the hungry Presbyters.

“Now,” said Telfair, looking straight at me, “there hath nothing happened this week in the Presbytery save the ordaining of this young man. Think ye that through him there will come this breaking asunder of the Kirk?”

Cameron smiled sardonically.

“How can ye suppose it for a moment? Mr. MacClellan is a youth of remarkable promise and rumour. We have, indeed, yet to learn whether there be aught behind this sound and show of religion and respect for the authority of the Kirk.”

All this time Drumglass was pouring forth without stint his joy at my settlement among them.

“Be never feared for the face o’ man, young sir,” he cried. “Be bold to declare what ye think and believe, and gif ye ken what ye want and earnestly pursue it, tak’ auld Drumglass’ word for it, there are few things that ye may not attain in this world.”

At long and last the day came to an end. The ministers of the Presbytery one by one took horse or ferry and so departed. I alone returned with Nathan Gemmell over to the house of Drumglass. For I was deadly wearied, and the voice of Nathan uplifted by the way to tell of old things was like the pleasant lappering of water on the sides of a boat in which one rocks and dreams. Indeed, I was scarce conscious of a word he said, till in the gloom of the trees and the creamy evening light, we met the two lasses, Jean and Alexander-Jonita walking arm in arm.

As we came within the shadow, they two divided the one from the other, the wild lass going to her father’s side, Jean being left to come to mine.

“I saw you not at the ordination, Alexander-Jonita!” said her father.

“No,” she answered sharply, “it was a brave day for the nowt to stray broadcast over the fell, and there was never a man, woman, or bairn about the house. Well might I remain to keep the evil-doers from the doors.”

I felt a soft hand touch mine as if by accident, and a low voice whispered close to my ear.

“But I was there. I watched it all, and when I saw you were kneeling before them all with the hands of the ministers upon your head, I had almost swooned away!”

The soft hand was fully in mine now. I was not conscious of having taken it, but nevertheless it lay trembling a little and yet nestling contentedly in my palm. And because I was tired and the day had been a labour and a burden to me, I was comforted that thus Jean’s hand abode in mine.

I pressed it and said, perhaps more gently than I ought, “Little one, I am glad you were there. But the work is a great one for so young and unworthy as I. It presses hard upon me!”

“But you have good friends,” said Jean, “friends that—that think of you always and wish you well.”

We had fallen a little way behind, and I could hear Alexander-Jonita in her high clear voice telling her father how she had found a sick sheep on the Duchrae Craigs and carried it all the way home on her back.

“What,” cried her father, “ower the heather and the moss-hags?”

“Aye,” she answered, as if the thing were nothing, “and what is more the poor beast is like to live and thrive.”

CHAPTER XVII.
THE BONNY LASS OF EARLSTOUN.

So I was settled in my parish, which was a good one as times went. The manse had recently been put in order. It was a pleasant stone house which sat in the bieldy hollow beneath the Kirk Knowe of Balmaghie. Snug and sheltered it lay, an encampment of great beeches sheltering it from the blasts, and the green-bosomed hills looking down upon it with kindly tolerant silence.

The broad Dee Water floated silently by, murmuring a little after the rains; mostly silent however—the water lapping against the reeds and fretting the low cavernous banks when the wind blew hard, but on the whole slipping past with a certain large peace and attentive stateliness.

My brother Hob abode with me in the manse of Balmaghie to be my man. It was great good fortune thus to keep him; and in the coming troublous days I ken not what I should have done without his good counsel and strongly willing right hand. My father and mother came over to see me on the old pony from Ardarroch, my mother riding on a pillion behind my father, and both of them ready on the sign of the least brae to get off and walk most of the way, with the bridle over my father’s arm, while my mother discoursed of the terrible thing it was to have two of your sons so far from home, strangers, as it were, in a strange land.

It had not seemed so terrible to her when we went to Edinburgh, both because she had never been to the city herself, and never intended to go. On these occasions Hob and I had passed out of sight along the green road to Balmaclellan on the way to Minnyhive, and there was an end of us till the spring, save for the little presents which came by the carrier, and the letters I had to write every fortnight.

But this parish of Balmaghie! It was a far cry and a coarse road, said my mother, and she was sure that we both took our lives in our hands each time that we went across its uncanny pastures.

Nevertheless, once there, she did not halt nor slacken till she had taken in hand the furniture and plenishing of the manse, and brought some kind of order out of the piled and tortured confusion, which had been the best that Hob and I could attain.

“Keep us, laddies!” she cried, after the first hopeless look at our handiwork. “I canna think on either o’ ye takin’ a wife. Yet I’m feared that a wife ye maun get atween ye. For I canna thole to let ye gang on this wild gate, wi’ the minister’s meal o’ meat to ready, and only gomeril Hob to do it.”

“Then ye’ll let Anna come to bide with us for a while, if ye are so vexed for us,” I said, to try her.

“Na, indeed, I canna do that. Anna is needed at hame where she is. There’s your faither now—he’s grown that bairnly he thinks there can be nae guid grass in the meadow that Anna’s foot treads not on. The hens wouldna lay, the kye wouldna let doon their milk withoot Anna. Ardarroch stands on the braeface because ’tis anchored doon wi’ Anna. Saw ye ever sic a fyke made aboot a lass?”

“Quintin has!” said Hob with intention, for which I did not thank him.

“What!” cried my mother, instantly taking fire, “hae some o’ the impudent queans o’ Balmaghie been settin’ their caps at him already?”

“There ye are, mither,” said Hob, “ye speak bravely aboot Quintin gettin’ married. But as soon as we speak aboot ony lass—plaff, ye gang up like a waft o’ tow thrown in the fire.”

“I wad like to see the besom that wad make up to my Quintin!” said my mother, her indignation beginning to simmer down.

“Then come over to the Drum——” he was beginning.

“Hob,” said I, sternly, “that is enough.”

And when I spoke to him thus Hob was amenable enough.

“Aweel, mither!” continued Hob in an injured tone, “ye speak aboot mairrying. Quintin there, ye say, is to get mairried. But how can he get mairried withoot a lass that is fond o’ him? It juist canna be done, at least no in the parish o’ Balmaghie.”

It was my intent to accompany my father and mother back to Ardarroch in name of an escort, but, in truth, chiefly that I might accept the invitation of the laird of Earlstoun and once more see Mary Gordon, the lass whose image I had carried so long on my heart.

For, strange as it may appear, when she went forth from the kirk that day she left a look behind her which went straight to my heart. It was like a dart thrown at random which sticks and is lost, yet inly rankles and will not let itself be forgotten.

I tried to shut the desire of seeing her again out of my heart. But do what I could this was not to be. It would rise, coming between me and the very paper on which I wrote my sermon, before I began to learn to mandate. When the sun looked over the water in the morning and shone on the globed pearls of dew in the hollow palms of the broad dockleaves on the gracious clover blooms, and on the bending heads of the spiked grasses, I rejoiced to think that he shone also on Earlstoun and the sunny head of a fairer and more graceful flower.

God forgive a sinful man! At these times I ought to have been thinking of something else. But when a man carries such an earthly passion in his heart, all the panoply of heavenly love is impotent to restrain thoughts that fly swift as the light from hilltop to hilltop at the sun-rising.

So I went home for a day or two to Ardarroch, where with a kind of gratitude I stripped my coat and fell to the building of dykes about the home park, and the mending of mangers and corn-chests with hammer and nail, till my mother remonstrated. “Quintin, are ye not ashamed, you with a parish of hungry souls to be knockin’ at hinges and liftin’ muckle stanes on the hillsides o’ Ardarroch?”

But Anna kept close to me all these days, understanding my mood. We had always loved one another, she and I. I had used to say that it was Anna who ought to have been the minister; for her eyes were full of a fair and gracious light, the gentle outshining of a true spirit within. And as for me, after I had been with her awhile, in that silence of sympathy, I was a better and a stronger man—at least, one less unfit for holy office.

Right gladly would I have taken Anna back with me to the manse of Balmaghie, but I knew well that she would not go.

“Quintin,” she was wont to say, “our faither and mither are not so young as they once were. My faither forgets things whiles, and the herd lads are not to trust to. David there is for ever on the trot to this farm-town and that other—to the clachan o’ St. John, to the New Town of Galloway, or to Balmaclellan—’tis all one to him. He cannot bide at home after the horses are out of the collar and the chain drops from the swingle-tree into the furrow.”

“But some day ye will find a lad for yourself, Anna, and then you will also be leaving Ardarroch and the auld folk behind ye.”

My sister smiled a quiet smile and her eyes were far away.

“Maybe—maybe,” she said, temperately, “but that day is not yet.”

“Has never a lad come wooin’ ye, Anna? Was there not Johnny of Ironmacanny, Peter Tait frae the Bogue, or——”

“Aye,” said Anna, “they cam’ and they gaed away to ither lasses that were readier to loe them. For I never saw a lad yet that I could like as well as my great silly brother who should be thinking more concerning his sermon-making than about putting daft thoughts into the heads of maidens.”

After this there was silence between us for a while. We had been sitting in the barn with both doors open. The wide arch to the front, opening out into the quadrangle of the courtyard, let in a cool drawing sough of air, and the smaller door at the back let it out again, and gave us at the same time a sweet eye-blink into the orchard, where the apples were hanging mellow and pleasant on the branches, and the leaves hardly yet loosening themselves for their fall. The light sifted through the leaves from the westering sun, dappling the grass and wavering upon the hard-beaten earthen floor of the barn.

“I am going over by to Earlstoun!” I said to Anna, without looking up.

Anna and I spoke but half our talks out loud. We had been such close comrades all our lives that we understood much without needing to clothe our thoughts in words.

Apparently Anna did not hear what I said, so I repeated it.

“Dinna,” was all she answered.

“And wherefore should I not?” I persisted, argumentatively. “The laird most kindly invited me, indeed laid it on me like an obligation that I should come.”

“Ye are going over to Earlstoun to see the laird?”

“Why, yes,” I said; “that is, he has a desire to see me. He is the greatest of all the Covenant men, and we have much in common to speak about.”

“To-morrow he will be riding by to the market at Kirkcudbright, where he has business. Ye can ride with him to the cross roads of Clachan Pluck and talk all that your heart desires of Kirk and State.”

“Anna,” said I, seriously, “I tell you again I am going to the house of Earlstoun to-morrow.”

In a moment she dropped her pretence of banter.

“Quintin, ye will only make your heart the sorer, laddie.”

“And wherefore?” said I.

“See the sparkle on the water out there,” she said, pointing to the bosom of Loch Ken far below us, seen through the open door of the barn; “it’s bonny. But can ye gather it in your hand, or wear it in your bosom? Dear and delightsome is this good smell of apples and of orchard freshness, but can ye fold these and carry them with you to the bare manse of Balmaghie for comfort to your heart? No more can ye take the haughtiness of the great man’s daughter, the glance of proud eyes, the heart of one accustomed to obedience, and bring them into subjection to a poor man’s necessities.”

“Love can do all,” said I, sententiously.

“Aye,” she said, “where love is, it can indeed work all things. But I bid ye remember that love dwells not yet in Mary Gordon’s breast for any man. Hers is not a heart to bend. For rank or fame she may give herself, but not for love.”

“Nevertheless,” said I, “I will go to the house of Earlstoun to-morrow at ten o’ the clock.”

Anna rose and laid her hand on mine.

“I kenned it,” she said, “and little would I think of you, brother of mine, if ye had ta’en my excellent advice.”

CHAPTER XVIII.
ONE WAY OF LOVE.

It was the prime of the morning when I set out for Earlstoun. My mother called after me to mind my manners, as if I had still been but a herdboy summoned into the presence of the great. My father asked me when I would be back. Only Anna said nothing, but her eyes were sad. Well she knew that I went to give myself an aching heart.

Now the Ken is a pleasant water, and the road up the Glenkens a fine road to travel. But I went it that morning heavily—rather, indeed, like one who goes to the burying of a friend than like a lover setting out to see his mistress.

I turned me down through the woods to Earlstoun. There were signs of the still recent return of the family. Here on the gate of the lodge was the effaced escutcheon of Colonel Theophilus Oglethorpe, which Alexander Gordon had not yet had time to replace with the ancient arms of his family. For indeed it was to Colonel William, Sandy Gordon’s brother, he who had led us to Edinburgh in the Convention year, that the recovery of the family estates was due.

I had not expected any especially kind welcome. The laird of Earlstoun had been a mighty Covenanter, and now wore his prisonments and sufferings somewhat ostentatiously, like so many orders of merit. He would think little of one who was a minister of the uncovenanted Kirk, and who, though holding the freedom of that Kirk as his heart’s belief, yet, nevertheless, demeaned him to take the pay of the State. To be faithful and devoted in service were not enough for Alexander Gordon. To please him one must do altogether as he had done, think entirely as he thought.

Yet I was to be more kindly received than I anticipated.

It was in the midst of the road where the wood, turning sharp along the waterside, a narrow path twines and twists through sparkling birches and trembling alders. The pools slept black beneath as I looked down upon them from some craggy pinnacle to which the grey hill lichen clung. The salmon poised themselves motionless, save for a waving fin, below the fish-leaps, ready for their rush upstream when the floods should come down brown with peat water from Cairnsmore and the range of Kells.

All at once, as I stood dreaming, I heard a gay voice lilting at a song. I wavered a moment in act to flee, my heart almost standing still to listen.

For I knew among a thousand the voice of Mary Gordon. But I had no time to conceal myself. A gleam of white and lilac through the bushes, a bright reflection as of sunshine on the pool—then the whole day brightened and she stood before me.

The song instantly stilled itself on her lips.

We stood face to face. It seemed to me that she paled a little. But perhaps it was only that I, who desired so greatly to see any evidence of emotion, saw part of that which I desired.

The next moment she came forward with her hand frankly outstretched.

“I bid you welcome to Earlstoun,” she said. “Alas! that my father should this day be from home. He is gone to Kirkcudbright. But my mother and I will show you hospitality till he return. My father hears a great word of you, he tells us. The country tongue speaks well of your labours.”

Now it seemed to me that in thus speaking she smiled to herself, and that put me from answering. I could do naught but be stiffly silent.

“I thank you, Mistress Mary, for your kind courtesy!” was all that I found within me to say. For I felt that she must despise me for a country lout of no manners and ungentle birth. So at least I thought at the time.

We passed without speech through the scattering shadows of the birches, and I saw that her hair (on which she wore no covering) had changed from its ancient yellow as of ripened corn into a sunny brown. Yet as I looked furtively, here and there the gentle crispen wavelets seemed to be touched and flecked with threads of its ancient sheen, a thing which filled me strangely with a desire to caress with my hand its desirable beauty—so carnal and wicked are the thoughts of the heart of man.

But when I saw her so lightsome and dainty, so full of delight and the admirable joy of living, a sullen sort of anger came over me that I should chance to love one who could in no wise love me again, nor yet render me the return which I so greatly desired.

“You have travelled all the long way from the Manse of Balmaghie?” she said, suddenly falling back to my side where the path was wider, as if she, too, felt the pause of constraint.

“Nay,” I answered, “I have been at Ardarroch with my father and mother for two days. And to-morrow I must return to the people among whom I labour.”

She stole a quick glance at me from beneath her long dark lashes. There was infinite teasing mischief in the flashing of her eyes.

“You have an empty manse by the waterside of Dee. Ye will doubtless be looking for some douce country lass to fill it.”

The words were kindly enough spoken, yet in the very frankness of the speech I recognised the distance she was putting between us. But I had not been trained in the school of quick retorts nor of the light debate of maidens. For all that I had a will of mine own, and would not permit that any woman born of woman should play cat’s-cradle with Quintin MacClellan.

“Lady,” said I, “there is, indeed, an empty manse down yonder by the Dee, and I am looking for one to fill it. But I will have none who cannot love me for myself, and also who will not love the work to which I have set my hand.”

She held up her hand in quick merriment.

“Do not be afraid,” she cried, gaily. “I was not thinking of making you an offer!”

And then she laughed so mirthsome a peal that all against my will I was forced to join her.

And this mended matters wonderfully. For after that, though I had my own troubles with her and my heart-breaks as all shall hear, yet never was she again the haughty maiden of the first sermon and the midsummer kirk door.

“They tell me that once ye brought me all the way from the Bennan-top to the tower of Lochinvar, where our Auntie Jean was biding?”

“I found no claims to your good-will on that,” said I, mindful of the day of my first way going to Edinburgh; “but I would fain have you think well of me now.”

“Ye are still over great a Whig. Mind that I stand for the White Rose,” she said, stamping her foot merrily.

“’Tis a matter ye ken nothing about,” said I, roughly. “Maidens had better let the affairs of State alone. Methinks the White Rose has brought little good to you and yours.”

“I tell you what, Sir Minister,” she cried, mocking me, “there are two great tubs in the pool below the falls. Do you get into one and I will take the other. I will fly the white pennon and you the blue. Then let us each take a staff and tilt at one another. If you upset me, ’pon honour, I will turn Whig, but if you are ducked in the pond, you must wear henceforth the colours of the true King. ’Tis an equal bargain. You agree?”

But before I could reply we were near by the gate of Earlstoun, and there came out a lady wrapped in a shawl, and this though the day was hot and the autumnal air had never an edge upon it.

“Mother,” cried Mary Gordon, running eagerly to meet her. The lady in the plaid seemed not to hear, but turned aside by the path which led along the water to the north.

The girl ran after her and caught her mother by the arm.

“Here is Mr. MacClellan, the minister from Balmaghie, come to see my father,” said she. “Bide, mother, and make him welcome.”

The lady stopped stiffly till I had come immediately in front of her.

“You are a minister of the Established and Uncovenanted Kirk?” she asked me, eyeing me sternly enough.

I told her that I had been ordained a week before.

“Then you have indeed broken your faith with the Persecuted Remnant, as they tell me?” she went on, keeping her eyes blankly upon my face.

“Nay,” said I; “I have the old ways still at heart and will stand till death by the faith delivered to the martyrs.”

“What do ye, then, clad in the rags of the State?”

Whereat I told the Lady of Earlstoun how that I was with all my heart resolved to fight the Kirk’s battle for her ancient liberties and for the power to rule within her own borders. But that if those in authority gave us not the hearing and liberty we desired, I, for one, would shake off the dust of the unworthy Kirk of Scotland from my feet—as, indeed, I was well resolved to do.

But Mary Gordon broke in on my eager explanation.

“Mother, mother,” she cried, “come your ways in and entertain the guest. Let your questionings keep till our father comes from Kirkcudbright. Assuredly they will have a stormy fortnight of it then. Let the lad now break bread and cheese.”

The lady sighed and clasped her hands.

“I suppose,” she said, “it must even be so; for men are carnal and their bodies must be fed. Alas, there are but few who care for the health of their souls! As for me, I was about to retire to the wood that I might for the hundred three score and ninth time renew my covenanting engagements.”

“You must break them very often, mother, that they are ever needing mending,” said her daughter, not so unkindly as the words look when written down, but rather carelessly, like one who has been oftentimes over the same ground and knows the landmarks by heart.

“Mary, Mary,” answered her mother, “I fear there is no serious or spiritual interest in you. Your father spoils and humours you. And so you have grown up—not like that godly lad Alexander Gordon the younger, who when he was but three years of his age had read the Bible through nineteen times, and could rattle off the books of the Old and New Testaments whiles I was counting ten.”

“Aye, mother,” replied the lass, “and in addition could make faces behind your back all the time he was doing it!”

But the lady appeared not to hear her daughter. She continued to clasp her hands convulsively before her, and to repeat over and over again the words, “Eh, the blessed laddie—the blessed, blessed laddie!”

How long we might have stood thus in the glaring sun I know not; but, without waiting for her mother to take the lead or to go in of her own accord, Mary Gordon wheeled her round by the arm and led her unresisting towards the courtyard gate. She accompanied her daughter with the same weary unconcern and passionless preoccupation she had shown from the first, twisting and pulling the fringes of the shawl between her fingers, while her thin lips moved, either in covenant-making or in the murmured praises of her favourite child.

The room to which we were brought was a large one with panels of oak carven at the cornices into quaint and formal ornaments.

Mary went to the stairhead and cried down as to one in the kitchen: “Thomas Allen! Thomas Allen!”

A thin, querulous voice arose from the depths: “Sic a fash! Wha’s come stravagin’ at this time o’ day? He will be wantin’ victual dootless. I never saw the like——”

“Thomas Allen! Haste ye fast, Thomas!”

“Comin’, mem, comin’! What’s your fret? There’s naebody in the deid-thraws,[10] is there?”

As the last words were uttered, an old serving-man, in a blue side-coat of thirty years before, with threadbare lace falling low at the neck and hands in a forgotten fashion, appeared at the doorway. His bald and shining head had still a few lyart locks clinging like white fringes about the sides. These, however, were not allowed to grow downward in the natural manner, but were trained as gardeners train fruit trees against walls that look to the south. They climbed directly upward so that the head of Thomas Allen was criss-crossed in both directions by streaks of hair, interlaced like the fingers of one’s hands netted together. But owing to the natural haste with which Thomas did his work, these were never all seen in place at one time. Invariably they had fallen to one side or the other, and being stiffened with candle grease or other greyish unguent, they stood out at all angles like goose quills from a scrivener’s inkpot.

During the perfunctory repast which was finally brought forward and placed on the table by the reluctant Thomas, Mistress Mary sat directly opposite to me with her chin resting on her fingers and her elbows on the table. Her mother, at the upper end of the chamber, occupied herself in looking out of the window, occasionally clasping her hands in the urgency of her supplications or giving vent to a pitiful moan which indicated her sense of the hopeless iniquity of mankind.

Then with more kindliness than she had ever yet shown me, Mary Gordon asked of my people of Balmaghie, whether the call had been unanimous, who abode with me in the manse, and many other questions, to all of which I answered as well as I could. For the truth is, that the nearness of so admirable a maid and the directness of her gaze wrought in me a kind of desperation, so that it was all I could do to keep from telling her then that I had come to the house of Earlstoun to ask her to be my wife.

Not that I had the wildest hope of a favourable answer, but simply from inexperience at the business of making love to a young lass I blundered blindly on. Plain ram-stam Hob could have bested me fairly at that. For he had not talked so long to the good-wives of the Lothians without getting a well-hung tongue in the head of him.

I looked sideways at the Lady of Earlstoun. She was mumbling at her devotions, or perhaps meditating other and more personal covenantings. Mary Gordon and I were in a manner alone.

“Mistress Mary,” I said, suddenly leaning towards her, my desperation getting the better of my natural prudence, “I know that I speak wholly without hope. But I came to-day to tell you that I love you. I am but a cotter’s lad, but I have loved you ever since I ferried you, a little maid, past the muskets of the troopers.”

I looked straight enough at her now. I could see the colour rise a little in her cheek, while a strange expression of wonder and pride, with something that was neither, overspread her face. Up to this point I might have been warned, but I was not to be holden now.

“Before I had no right, nor, indeed, any opportunity to tell you this. But now, as minister of a parish, I have an income that will compare not unfavourably with that of most of the smaller gentry of the county.”

The girl nodded, with a swift hardening of the nostril.

“It will doubtless be a fine income,” she said, with a touch of scorn. “Did I understand you to offer me your manse and income?”

“I offer you that which neither dishonours an honest girl to hear or yet an honest man to speak. I am offering you my best service, the faith and devotion of a man who truly loves you.”

“I thank you, sir,” she said, lifting up her head and letting her eyes dwell on me with some of their former haughtiness; “I am honoured indeed. Your position, your manse, your glebe! How many acres did you say it was? Your income, good as that of a laird. And you come offering all these to Mary Gordon? Sir, I bid you carry your business transactions to the county market-place. Mary Gordon is not to be bought and sold. When she loves, she will give herself for love and love alone. Aye, were it to a poke-laden houseless cadger by the roadside, or a ploughman staggering between the furrows!”

And with that she rose and walked swiftly to the door. I could hear her foot die away through the courtyard; and going blankly to the window, I watched her slim figure glance between the clumps of trees, now in the light, now in the shadow, and anon lost in the yellowing depths of the forest.

Nor, though I watched all through the long hot afternoon, did she return till she came home riding upon her father’s horse, with Sandy Gordon himself walking bareheaded beside his daughter, as if he had been escorting a queen on her coronation day.

CHAPTER XIX.
ANOTHER WAY OF LOVE.
(Comment and Addition by Hob MacClellan.)

Lord! Lord! Was there ever a more bungled affair—a more humiliating confession. Our poor Quintin—great as he was at the preaching, an apostle indeed, none in broad Scotland to come within miles of him in the pulpit—with a lass was simply fair useless. I must e’en tell in a word how mine own wooing sped, that I may prove there was some airt and spunk left among the MacClellans.

For by Quintin’s own showing the girl had no loop-hole left, being wooed as if she had been so many sacks of corn. She was fairly tied up to refuse so hopeless and fushionless a suitor.

But of all this there was no suspicion at the time, neither in the parish of Balmaghie, or yet even among ourselves at Ardarroch. For though nothing gets wind so quickly in a parish as the news that the minister is “seekin”—that is, going from home courting, yet such was my brother’s repute for piety “within the bounds of the Presbytery,” such the reverence in which he was held, that the popular voice considered him altogether trysted to no maiden, but to the ancient and honourable Kirk of Scotland as she had been in the high days of her pride and purity.

“Na,” they would say, “our minister will never taingle himsel’ wi’ marriage engagements while there is a battle to be fought for the Auld Banner o’ Blue.” So whereas another might not so much as look over the wall, my brother might have stolen all the horses before their eyes.

And I think it was this great popular repute of him which first set his fellow-ministers against him, far more than any so-called “defections” and differences either ecclesiastical or political.

I have seen him at a sacrament at Dalry hold the listening thousands so that they swayed this way and that like barley shaken by the winds. Never beheld I the like—the multitude of the folk all bending their faces to one point—careless young lads from distant farms, light-headed limmers of lasses, bairns that had been skipping about the kirk-yard and playing “I spy” among the tombstones while other ministers were preaching—all now fixed and spellbound when my brother rose to speak, and his full bell-like voice sounded out from the preaching-tent over their heads.

I think that if at any time he had held up his hand and called them to follow him to battle, every man would have gone forth as unquestionably as did Cameron’s folk on that fatal day of the Moss of Ayr.

But I who sat there, with eyes sharpened and made jealous by exceeding love for my brother, could see clearly the looks of dark suspicion, the sneers that dwelt on sanctimonious lips, the frowns of envy and ill-will as Quintin stood up, and the folk poured anxiously inward towards the preaching-tent to hear him. I noted also the yet deeper anger of those who succeeded him, when multitudes rose and forsook the meeting because there was to be no more of the young minister o’ Balmaghie that day.

Now though it was rather on the point of politics and of the standing of the kirk, her right to rule herself without interference of the State, her ancient independence and submission to Christ the only head of the church, that Quintin was finally persecuted and called in question, yet, as all men know in Galloway, it was really on account of the popular acclaim, the bruit of great talents and godliness which he held among all men, beyond any that ever came into the countryside, and of his quietness and persistence also in holding his own and keeping a straight unvarying course amid all threatenings and defections, which brought the final wrath upon him and constituted the true head and front of his offending.

Aye, and men saw that the storm was brewing over him long before it burst.

For several of the Galloway ministers had deliberately left the folk of the mountains for the sake of a comfortable down-sitting in bein and sheltered parishes. Some of them even owed their learning at the Dutch Universities to the poor purses of these covenanting societies.

And so when papers came down from the Privy Council or from the men who, like Carstairs, posed as little gods and popes infallible, the Presbytery men greedily signed them, swallowing titles, oaths and obligations with shut eye and indiscriminate appetite lest unhappily they would be obliged to consult their consciences.

Such men as constituted the Presbytery of Kirkcudbright had but one motto—a clear and useful one indeed at such a time, “Those in power can do no wrong!”

So three years went uneasily by, and meantime the parish of Balmaghie had grown to know and love our Quintin. There was hardly a rascal drover, a common villain pig-dealer who was not ready to crack a skull at an ill word said of him even in jest. Men who in time past had sneered at religion, and had never any good report of ministers, dull clods with ideals tethered to the midden and the byre, waked up at sight of him, and would travel miles to hear him preach.

And thus three happy unstirred years went by. I abode in the manse with Quintin, and every morning when I arose at break of day to take the cattle afield, or to set the plough in the glebe, I would see that his window-blind was withdrawn, his candle alight if it were winter, and that he had already set him down with his book. Or sometimes when the summer evening darkened to dusk I would meet him wandering, his hands clasped behind his back, and his whole soul steeped in meditation by the whispering rushes of the waterside.

Yet what a simpleton in worldly things he was; and, mayhap, that was what made me love him the more.

For about this time there began a stir and a bruit of the matter of little Jean Gemmell, a soft-voiced, die-away lass that I would not have troubled my head about for a moment. She had, truth to tell, set herself to catch our foolish Quintin, whose heart was in good sooth fully given to another. And how she did it, let himself tell. But I, that thought nothing of a lass without spirit, would often warn him to beware. But he minded me not, smiling and giving the subject the go-by in a certain sober and serious way he had which somehow silenced me against my will.

But in between my brother’s ill-starred wooing of the bonny lass of Earlstoun, and Jean Gemmell’s meek-eyed courtship of him, I also had been doing somewhat on mine own account.

At the house of Drumglass there abode one who to my mind was worth all the haughty damsels of great houses and all the sleek and kittenish eyes-makers in broad Scotland.

When first I saw Alexander-Jonita come over the hill, riding a Galloway sheltie barebacked, her dark hair streaming in the wind, and the pony speeding over the heather like the black charger of Clavers on the side of Cairn Edward, I knew that there was no hope for my heart. I had indeed fancied myself in love before. So much was expected of a lad in our parts. But Alexander-Jonita was a quest worth some enterprising to obtain.

The neighbours, at least the rigidly righteous of them, were inclined to look somewhat askance upon a lass that went so little to the Kirk, and companioned more with the dumb things of the field than with her own kith and kin. But Quintin would ask such whether their own vineyard was so well kept, their own duty so faultlessly done, that they could afford to keep a stone ready to cast at Alexander-Jonita.

I remember the first time that ever I spoke to her words beyond the common greetings and salutations of lad and lass.

It was a clear night in early June. I had been over at Ardarroch seeing my mother, and now having passed high up the Black Water of Dee, I was making my way across the rugged fells and dark heathery fastnesses to the manse of Balmaghie.

The mist was rising about the waterside. It lingered in pools and drifts in every meadowy hollow, but the purpling hilltops were clear and bare in the long soft June twilight.

Suddenly a gun went off, as it seemed in my very ear. I sprang a foot into the air, for who on honourable business would discharge a musket in that wild place at such a time.

But ere I had time to think, above me on the ridge a figure stood black against the sky—a girl’s shape it was, slim, tall, erect. She carried something in one hand which trailed on the heather, and a musket was under her arm, muzzle down.

I had not yet recovered my breath when a voice came to me.

“Ah, Hob MacClellan, the ill deil tak’ your courting-jaunts this nicht! For had ye bidden at hame I would have gotten baith o’ the red foxes that have been killing our weakly lambs. As it is, I gat but this.”

And she held up a great dog fox by the brush before throwing the body into a convenient moss-hole.

It was Alexander-Jonita, the lass whom our college-bred Quintin had once called the Diana of Balmaghie. I care not what he called her. Without question she was the finest lass in the countryside. And that I will maintain to this day.

“Are you going home, Jonita?” cried I, for the direction in which she was proceeding led directly away from the house of Drumglass.

“No,” she answered carelessly, “I am biding all night in the upper ‘buchts.’ The foxes have been very troublesome of late, and I am thinning them with the gun. I have the feck of the lambs penned up there.”

“And who is with you to help you?” I asked her in astonishment.

“Only the dogs,” she made answer, shifting the gun from one shoulder to the other.

“But, lassie,” I cried, “ye surely do not sleep out on the hills all your lone like this?”

“And what for no?” she answered sharply. “What sweeter bed than a truss of heather? What safer than with two rough tykes of dogs and a good gun at one’s elbow, with the clear airs blowing over and the sheep lying snugly about the folds?”

“But when it rains,” I went on, still doubtfully.

“Come and see,” she laughed; “we are near the upper ‘buchts’ now!”

Great stone walls of rough hill boulders, uncut and unquarried, rose before me. I saw a couple of rough collies sit guardian one at either side of the little lintelled gate that led within. The warm smell of gathered sheep, ever kindly and welcome to a hill man, saluted my nostrils as I came near. A lamb bleated, and in the quiet I could hear it run pattering to nose its mother.

Alexander-Jonita led me about the great “bucht” to a niche formed by a kind of cairn built into the side of a wall of natural rock. Here a sort of rude shelter had been made with posts driven into the crevices of the rock and roughly covered with turves of heather round the sides of a ten-foot enclosure. The floor was of bare dry rock, but along one side there was arranged a couch of heather tops recently pulled, very soft and elastic. At first I could not see all this quite clearly in the increasing darkness, but after a little, bit by bit the plan of the shelter dawned upon me, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light.

“When it rains,” she said, going back to my question, “I set a post in the middle for a tent pole, spread my plaid over it and fasten it down at the sides with stones.”

“Jonita,” said I, “does your sister never come up hither with you?”

“Who—our Jean!” she cried, astonished, “faith, no! Jean takes better with the inside of a box-bed and the warmth of the peat-grieshoch[11] on the hearth! And, indeed, the lass is not over-strong. But as for me, more than the cheeping of the house-mice, I love the chunnering of the wild fowl in their nests and the bleat of the sheep. These are honey and sweetness to me.”

“But, Jonita,” I went on, “surely no girl is strong enough to take shower and wind-buffet night and day on the wild moors like this. Why, you make me ashamed, me that am born and bred to the trade.”

“And what am I?” she asked sharply, “I am over twenty, and yet nothing but an ignorant lass and careless of seeming otherwise. I am not even like my sister Jean that can look and nod as if she understood everything your brother is talking about, knowing all the while naught of the matter. But, at least, I ken the ways of the hills. Feel that!”

She thrust her arm suddenly out to me.

I clasped it in my hands, sitting meantime on a great stone in the angle, while she stood beside me with the dogs on either side of her. It was a smooth, well-rounded arm, cool and delicate of skin, that she gave into my fingers. Her loose sleeve fell back, and if I had dared to follow my desire, I should have set my lips to it, so delightful did the touch of it seem to me. But I refrained me, and presently underneath the satin skin I felt the muscles rise nobly, tense yet easy, clean of curve and spare flesh, moulded alike for strength and suppleness.

“I would not like to pull at the swingle-tree with you, my lass,” said I, “and if it came to a Keltonhill collieshangie I would rather have you on my side than against me.”

And I think she was more pleased at that than if I had told her she was to be a great heiress.

As I waited there on the rough stones of the sheepfold, and looked at the slight figure sitting frankly and easily beside me, thinking, as I knew, no more of the things of love than if she had been a neighbour lad of the hills, a kind of jealous anger came over me.

“Jonita,” said I, “had ye never a sweetheart?”

“A what?” cried Jonita in a tone of as much surprise as if I had asked her if she had ever possessed an elephant.

“A lad that loved you as other maids are loved.”

“I have heard silly boys speak nonsense,” she said, “but I am no byre-lass to be touselled in corners by every night-raker that would come visiting at the Drumglass.”

“Jonita,” I went on, “hath none ever helped you with your sheep on the hill, run when you wanted him, stopped when you told him, come like a collie to your foot when he was called?”

“None, I tell you, has ever sat where you are sitting, Hob MacClellan! And hear ye this, had I thought you a silly ‘cuif’ like the rest, it would have been the short day of December and the long again before I had asked you to view my bower under the rock.”

“I was only asking, Jonita,” said I; “ye ken that ye are the bonniest lass in ten parishes, and to me it seemed a strange thing that ye shouldna hae a lad.”

“Bah,” said she, “lads are like the pebbles in the brook. They are run smooth with many experiences, courting here and flattering there. What care I whether or no this one or that comes chapping at my door? There are plenty more in the brook. Besides, are there not the hills and the winds and the clear stars over all, better and more enduring than a thousand sweethearts?”

“But,” said I, “the day will come, Jonita, when you may be glad of the friend’s voice, the kindly eye, the helping hand, the arm beneath the head——”

“I did not say that I desired to have no friends,” she said, as it seemed in the darkness, a little shyly.

“Will you let me be your friend?” I said, impulsively, taking her hand.

“I do not know,” said Alexander-Jonita; “I will tell you in the morning. It is over-dark to-night to see your eyes.”

“Can you not believe?” said I. “Have you ever heard that I thus offered friendship to any other maid in all the parish?”

“You might have offered it to twenty and they taken it every one for aught I care. But Alexander-Jonita Gemmell accepts no man’s friendship till she has tried him as a fighter tries a sword.”

“Then try me, Jonita!” I cried, eagerly.

“I will,” said she, promptly; “rise this instant from the place where ye sit, look not upon me, touch me not, say neither good e’en nor yet good-day, but take the straight road and the ready to the manse of Balmaghie.”

The words were scarce out of her mouth when with a leap so quick that the collies had not even time to rise, I was over the dyke and striding across the moss and whinstone-crag towards the house by the waterside, where my brother’s light had long been burning over his books.

I did not so much as look about me till I was on the crest of the hill. Then for a single moment I stood looking back into the clear grey bath of night behind me, where the lass I loved was keeping her watch in the lonely sheepfold.

Yet I was pleased with myself too. For though my dismissal had been so swift and unexpected, I felt that I had not done by any means badly for myself.

At least I could call Alexander-Jonita my friend. And there was never a lad upon all the hills of heather that could do so much.

CHAPTER XX.
MUTTERINGS OF STORM.
(The Narrative of Quintin MacClellan resumed.)

It was a day of high summer when the anger of mine enemies drew finally to a head, and that within mine own land of Balmaghie. The Presbytery were in the habit of meeting at a place a little way from the centre of the parish, called Cullenoch—or, as one would say in English, “The Woodlands.”

In twos or threes they came, riding side by side on their ponies, or appearing singly out of some pass among the hills. So, as I say, the Presbytery assembled at Cullenoch, and the master of it, Andrew Cameron of Kirkcudbright, was there, with his orders from wily Carstaires, the pope of the restored Kirk of Scotland.

To this day I can see his aspect as he rose up among the brethren with a great roll in his hand—solemn, portentous, full of suave, easy words and empty, sonorous utterances.

“Fathers and brethren,” he said, looking on us with a comprehending pity for our feebleness of capacity, “there hath come that from Her Most Noble and Christian Majesty the Queen Anna, which it behooves us to treat with all the respect due to one who is at once the Anointed of God, and also as the fountain of all authority, in some sense also the Head of the Church!”

As he finished he laid upon the table a great parchment, and tapped it impressively with his finger.

“It is, if I may be permitted the words, the message of God’s vicegerent upon earth; whom His own finger has especially designed to rule over us. And I am well assured that no one among the brethren of the Presbytery will be so ill-advised as not at once to sign this declaration of our submission and dutiful obedience to our Liege lady in all things.”

This he uttered soundingly, with much more to the same purpose, standing up all the time, and glowering about him on the look-out for contradiction.

Then, though I was the youngest member of the Presbytery, save one, I felt that for the ancient liberty of the Kirk and for the sake of the blood shed on the moors, I could not permit so great a scandal as this to pass. I rose in my place, whilst Cameron looked steadily upon me, endeavouring to browbeat me into silence.

Somewhat thus I spoke:

“The most learned and reverend brother brings us a paper to sign—a paper which we have neither seen nor yet heard read. It comes (he tells us) from the Church’s head, from God’s vicegerent. It is to be received with hushed breath and bowed knee. ‘The Head of the Church!’ says Mr. Cameron—ah, brethren, the men who have so lately entered into rest through warring stress, sealed with their blood the testimony that the Kirk of God has no head upon earth. The Kirk of Scotland is the Kirk of Jesus Christ, the alone King and Head of the Church. The Kirk of Scotland is more noble, high and honourable in herself than any human government. She alone is God’s vicegerent. She alone has power within her own borders to rule her own affairs. The Kirk has many faults, but at least she will surely never permit herself to be ruled again by Privy Councils and self-seeking state-craft. Is she not the Bride, the Lamb’s wife? And for me, and for any that may adhere to me, we will sign no test nor declaration which shall put our free necks beneath the yoke of any temporal power, nor yet for fear of this or that Queen’s Majesty deny the Name that is above every name.”

Whilst these words were put into my heart and spoken by my voice, I seemed, as it were, taken possession of. A voice prompted me what I was to speak. I heard the sound of rushing wings, and though I was but lately a herd-lad on the hills of sheep I knew that the time had come, which on the day of the Killing on the Bennan Top I had seen afar off.

Whilst I was speaking, Cameron stood impatiently bending the tips of his politic fingers upon the document on the table. A dark frown had been gathering on his brow.

“This is treason, black treason! It is blank defiance of the Queen’s authority!” he cried; “I will not listen to such words. It is the voice of a man who would raise the standard of rebellion, and disturb the peace of all the parishes of our Kirk, recently and adequately settled according to the laws of the land.”

But I had yet a word to say.

“I am neither rebel nor heretic,” said I; “I am, it is true, the youngest and the least among you. But even I am old enough to have seen men shot like running deer for the liberties of the Kirk of God. I have heard the whistle of the deadly bullet flying at the command of kings and queens called in their day Heads of the Church. I have seen the martyr fall, and his blood redden the ooze of the moss hag. We have heard much of tests and papers to sign, of allegiances to other divine vicegerents upon earth, even to such Lord’s anointeds as James and Charles, the father and the uncle of her in whose name the Privy Council of Scotland now demands this most abject submission. But for myself I will sign no such undertaking, give countenance to no bond which might the second time deliver us who have fought for our ancient liberties with weapons in our hands, bound hand and foot to the powers temporal—yea, that we might wrest the powers of the spiritual arm from the Son of God and deliver them to the daughter of James Stuart.”

“And who are you,” cried Cameron, “thus to teach and instruct men who were ministers when you were but a bairn, to reprove those who have wrought in sun and shine, and in gloom and darkness alike, to make the Kirk of Scotland what she is this day?”

There was a noise of some approval among the Presbytery. I knew, however, that I had small sympathy among those present, men fearful of losing their pleasant livings and fat stipends. Nevertheless, very humbly I made answer. “It is not Quintin MacClellan, but the word he speaks that cannot be gainsaid. There is also an old saying that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings God expects the perfection of praise.”

“Fool!” cried Cameron, “ye would endanger and cast down the fair fabric of this Kirk of Scotland, ignorantly pulling down what wiser and better men have laboriously built up. Ye are but a child throwing stones at windows and ready to run when the glass splinters. You stand alone among us, sir—alone in Scotland!”

“I stand no more alone,” I replied, “than your brother Richard Cameron did at Ayrsmoss when he rode into the broil and tumult of battle for the honour of the Covenant. The Banner of Christ’s cause that was trampled in the peat-brew of the moss of Ayr, is a worthier standard than the rag of submission which lies upon the table under your hand.”

Cameron was silent. He liked not the memory of his great brother. I went on, for the man’s pliable pitifulness angered me.

“Think you that Richard Cameron would have signed words like these? Aye, I think he would. But it would have been with his sword, cutting the vile bond into fragments, giving them to the winds, and strewing them upon the waters.”

Then the Presbytery would hear no more, but by instant vote and voice they put me forth. Yet ere I went from their midst, I cried, “If there be any that think more of the freedom of God’s Kirk in this land of Scotland than of their stipends and glebes, let them come forth with me.”

And two there were who rose and followed—Reid of Carsphairn, a man zealous and far-seeing, and one other, a young minister lately come within the bounds.

So the door was shut upon us, and they that hated us were left to concert their measures without let or hindrance.

And for a moment we three clasped hands without the door.

“Let us stand by each other and the word of truth,” I said, “and the truth shall never make us ashamed.”

CHAPTER XXI.
THE EYES OF A MAID.

Now throughout all the parish, aye, and throughout all Galloway there arose infinite noise and bruit of this thing. Specially was there the buzz of anger in the hill parishes, where the men who had lain in the moss-hags and fought for the ancient liberties dwelt thickest—in Carsphairn, in the Glenkens, and in mine own Balmaghie.

As I went over the hill from farm-town to farm-town the herds would cry down “Well done!” from among the sheep. Old men who had seen the high days of the Kirk before the fatal home-coming of King Charles; rough, buirdly men who had done their share of hiding and fighting in the troubles; young men who, like myself, had heard in their cradles but the murmur of the fray, came to shake my hand and bid me strengthen my knees and stick to my testimony.

“For,” said a venerable elder, one Anthony Lennox of the Duchrae, who had been a famous man in the sufferings, “this is the very truth for which we bled. We asked for the kernel, and lo! they have given us the dry and barren husk. We fought for ‘Christ’s Crown and Covenant,’ and they have sent us a banner with the device—‘Queen Anne’s Crown and the Test!’”

But I think that the women were even more warmly on our side, for the canker of persecution had eaten deeper into their hearts, that had only waited and mourned while their men folk were out suffering and fighting.

“Be ye none feared, laddie,” said Millicent Hannay, an ancient dame who had stood the thumbikins thrice in the gaol of Kirkcudbright; “the most part of the ministers may stick like burrs to their manses and glebes, their tiends and tithings. But if so be, ye are thrust forth into the wilderness, ye will find manna there—aye, and water from the rock and a pillar of fire going before to lead you out again.”

But nowhere was I more warmly welcomed than in the good house of Drumglass. The herd lads and ploughmen were gathered at the house-end when I came up the loaning, and even as I passed one of them came forward with his blue bonnet in his hand.

“Fear not, sir,” he said, with a kind of bold, self-respecting diffidence common among our Galloway hinds. “I speak for all our lads with hearts and hands. We will fight for you. Keep the word of your testimony, and we will sustain you and stand behind you. If we will unfurl the blue banner again, we will plant right deep the staff.”

And from the little group of stalwart men at the barn-end there came a low murmur of corroboration, “We will uphold you!”

Strange as it is to-day to think on these things when most men are so lukewarm for principle. But in those days the embers of the fires of persecution were yet warm and glowing, and men knew not when they might again be blown up and fresh fuel added thereto.

“Come awa’,” cried Nathan Gemmell heartily, from where he sat on the outer bench of moss-oak by the door-cheek, worn smooth by generations of sitters, “come awa’, minister, and tell us the news. Faith, it makes me young-like again to hear there is still a man that thinks on the Covenants and the blue banner wi’ the denty white cross. And though they forget the auld flag noo, I hae seen it gang stacherin’ doon the streets o’ the toon o’ Edinburg wi’ a’ the folk cryin’ ‘Up wi’ the Kirk an’ doon wi’ the King!’ till there wasna a sodjer-body dare show his face, nor a King’s man to be found between the Castle and the Holyrood House. Hech-how-aye! auld Drumglass has seen that.

“And eke he saw the lads that were pitten doon on the green Pentland slopes in the saxty-sax start frae the Clachan o’ Saint John wi’ hopes that were high, sharpening their bits o’ swords and scythes to withstand the guns o’ Dalzyell. And but few o’ them ever wan back. But what o’ that? It’s a brave thrang there wad be about heaven’s gates that day—the souls o’ the righteous thranging and pressing to win through, the rejoicing of a multitude that had washed their robes and made them white in the blood o’ the Lamb.

“Ow, aye, ye wonder at me, that am a carnal man, speakin’ that gate. But it is juist because I am a man wha’ has been a sore sinner, that I wear thae things sae near my heart. My time is at hand. Soon, soon will auld Drumglass, wastrel loon that he is, be thrown oot like a useless root ower the wa’ and carried feet foremost from out his chamber door. But if it’s the Lord’s will” (he rose to his feet and shook his oaken staff) “if it’s the Lord’s will, auld Drumglass wad like to draw the blade frae the scabbard yince mair, and find the wecht o’ the steel in his hand while yet his auld numb fingers can meet aboot the basket hilt.

“Oh, I ken, I ken; ye think the weapons of our warfare are not to be swords and staves, minister—truth will fight for us, ye say.

“I daresay ye are right. But gin the hoodie-craws o’ the Presbytery come wi’ swords and staves to put ye forth from your parish and your kindly down-sitting, ye will be none the worse of the parcel o’ braw lads ye saw at the barn-end, every man o’ them wi’ a basket-hilted blade in his richt hand and a willing Galloway heart thump-thumpin’ high wi’ itching desire to be at the red coaties o’ the malignants.”

Then we went in, and there by the fireside, looking very wistfully out of her meek eyes at me, stood the young lass, Jean Gemmell. She came forward holding out her hand, saying no word, but the tears still wet on her lashes—why, I know not. And she listened as her father asked of the doings at the Presbytery, and looked eager and anxious while I was answering. Presently Auld Drumglass went forth on some errand about the work of the ploughlads, and the lass and I were left alone together in the wide kitchen.

“And they will indeed put you forth out of house and home?” she asked, looking at me with sweet, reluctant eyes, the eyes of a mourning dove. She stood by the angle of the hearth where the broad ingle-seat begins. I sat on her father’s chair where he had placed me and looked over at her. A comely lass she was, with her pale cheeks and a blush on them that went and came responsive to the beating of her heart.

I had not answered, being busy with looking at her and thinking how I wished Mistress Mary Gordon had been as gentle and biddable as this lass. So she asked again, “They will not put you forth from your kirk and parish, will they?”

“Nay, that I know not,” I said, smiling; “doubtless they will try.”

“Oh, I could not listen to another minister after——”

She stopped and sighed.

It was in my mind to rebuke her, and to bid her remember that the Word of God is not confined to any one vessel of clay, but just then she put her hand to her side, and went withal so pale that I could not find it in my heart to speak harshly to the young lass.

Then I told her, being stirred within me by her emotion, of the two who had stood by me in the Presbytery, and how little hope I had that they would manfully see it out to the end.

“’Tis a fight that I must fight alone,” I said.

For I knew well that it would come to that, and that so soon as the affair went past mere empty words those two who had stood at my shoulder would fall behind or be content to bide snugly at home.

“Not alone!” said the young lass, quickly, and moved a step towards me with her hand held out. Then, with a deep and burning blush, her maiden modesty checked her, and she stood red like a July rose in the clear morning.

She swayed as if she would have fallen, and, leaping up quickly, I caught her in my arms ere she had time to fall.

Her eyes were closed. The blood had ebbed from her face and left her pale to the very lips. I stood with her light weight in my arms, thrilling strangely, for, God be my judge, never woman had lain there before.

Presently she gave a long snatching breath and opened her eyes. I saw the tears gather in them as her head lay still and lax in the hollow of my arm. The drops did not fall, but rather gathered slowly like wells that are fed from beneath.

“You will not go away?” she said, and at last lifted her lashes, with a little pearl shining wet on each, like a swallow that has dipped her wings in a pool.

Then, because I could not help it, I did that which I had never done to any woman born of woman: I stooped and kissed the wet sweet eyes. And then, ere I knew it, with a little cry of frightened joy, the girl’s arms were about me. She lifted up her face, and kissed me again and again and yet again.

. . . . . . .

When I came to myself I was conscious of another presence in the kitchen. I looked up quickly, and there before me, standing with an ash switch swaying in her hand, was Alexander-Jonita. I had not supposed that she could have looked so stern.

“Well?” she said, as if waiting for my explanation.

“I love your sister,” I replied; for indeed, though I had not thought thus of the matter before, there seemed nothing else to be said.

But the face of Alexander-Jonita did not relax. She stood gazing at her sister, whose head rested quiet and content on my shoulder.

“Jean,” she said at last, “knowing that which you know, why have you done this?”

The girl lifted her head, and looked at Jonita with a kind of glad defiance.

“Sister,” she said, “you do not understand love. How should you know what one would do for love?”

“You love my sister Jean?” Jonita began again, turning to me with a sharpness in her words like the pricking of a needle’s point.

“Yes!” I answered, but perhaps a little uncertainly.

“Did you know as much when you came into the kitchen?”

“No,” said I.

For indeed I knew not what to answer, never having been thus tangled up with women’s affairs in my life before.

“I thought not,” said Jonita, curtly. Then to Jean, “How did this come about?” she said.

Jean lifted her head, her face being lily-pale and her body swaying a little to me.

“I thought he would go away and that I should never see him again!” she replied, a little pitifully, with the quavering thrill of unshed tears in her voice.

“And you did this knowing—what you know!” said Jonita again, sternly.

“I saw him first,” said Jean, a little obstinately, looking down the while.

Her sister flushed crimson.

“Oh, lassie,” she cried, “ye will drive me mad with your whims and foolish speeches; what matters who saw him first? Ye ken well that ye are not fit to be——”

“She is fit to be my wife,” I said, for I thought that this had gone far enough; “she is fit to be my wife, and my wife she shall surely be if she will have me!”

With a little joyful cry Jean Gemmell’s arms went about my neck, and her wet face was hidden in my breast. It lay there quiet a moment; then she lifted it and looked with a proud, still defiance at her sister.

Alexander-Jonita lifted up her hands in hopeless protest.

She seemed about to say more, but all suddenly she changed her mind.

“So be it,” she said. “After all, ’tis none of my business!”

And with that she turned and went out through the door of the kitchen.

CHAPTER XXII.
THE ANGER OF ALEXANDER-JONITA.
(Comment and Addition by Hob MacClellan.)

I met my lass Jonita that night by the sheep-fold on the hill. It was not yet sundown, but the spaces of the heavens had slowly grown large and vague. The wind also had gradually died away to a breathing stillness. The scent of the bog-myrtle was in our nostrils, as if the plant itself leaned against our faces.

I had been waiting a long time ere I heard her come, lissomly springing from tuft to tuft of grass and whistling that bonny dance tune, “The Broom o’ the Cowdenknowes.” But even before I looked up I caught the trouble in her tones. She whistled more shrilly than usual, and the liquid fluting of her notes, mellow mostly like those of the blackbird, had now an angry ring.

“What is the matter, Alexander-Jonita?” I cried, e’er I had so much as set eyes on her.

The whistling ceased at my question. She came near, and leaning her elbows on the dyke, she regarded me sternly.

“Then you know something about it?” she said, looking at me between the eyes, her own narrowed till they glinted wintry and keen as the gimlet-tool wherewith the joiner bores his holes.

“Has your father married the dairymaid, or Meg the pony cast a shoe?” I asked of her, with a lightness I did not feel.

“Tut,” she cried, “’tis the matter of your brother, as well you know.”

“What of my brother?”

“Why, our silly Jean has made eyes at him, and let the salt water fall on the breast of his black minister’s coat. And now the calf declares that he loves her!”

I stood up in sharp surprise.

“He no more loves her than—than——”

“Than you love me,” said Alexander-Jonita; “I know—drive on!”

I did not notice her evil-conditioned jibe.

“Why, Jonita, he has all his life been in love with the Lady Mary—the Bull of Earlstoun’s daughter.”

Alexander-Jonita nodded pensively.

“Even so I thought,” she said, “but, as I guess, Mary Gordon has sent him about his business, and so he has been taken with our poor Jean’s puling pussydom. God forgive me that I should say so much of a dying woman.”

“A dying woman!” cried I, “there is nothing the matter with Jean.”

Alexander-Jonita shook her head.

“Jean is not long for this world,” she said, “I bid you remember. Saw you ever the red leap through the white like yon, save when the life burns fast to the ashes and the pulse beats ever more light and weak?”

“And how long hath this thing been afoot?”

“Since the day of your brother’s first preaching, when to save her shoon Jean must needs go barefoot and wash her feet in the burn that slips down by the kirkyard wall.”

“That was the day Quintin first spoke with her, when she gave him her nooning piece of bread to stay his hunger.”

“Aye,” said Alexander-Jonita; “better had he gone hungry all sermon-time than eaten of our Jean’s piece.”

“For shame, Alexander-Jonita!” I cried, “and a double shame to speak thus of a lassie that is, by your own tale, dying on her feet—and your sister forbye. I believe that ye are but jealous!”

She flamed up in sudden anger. If she had had a knife or a pistol in her hand, I believe she would have killed me.

“Get out of our ewe-buchts before I twist your impudent neck, Hob MacClellan!” she cried. “I care not a docken for any man alive—least of all for you and your brother. Yet I thought, from what I heard of his doings at the Presbytery, that he was more of a man than any of you. But now I see that he is feckless and feeble like the rest.”

“Ah, Jonita, you snooded folk tame us all. From David the King to Hob MacClellan there is no man so wise but a woman may tie him in knots about her little finger.”

“I thought better of your brother!” she said more mildly, her anger dying away as suddenly as it had risen, and I think she sighed.

“But not better of me!” I said.

She looked at me with contempt, but yet a contempt mightily pleasant.

“Good e’en to ye, Hob,” she cried. “I was not so far left to myself as to think about you at all!”

And with that she took her light plaid over her arm with a saucyish swirl, and whistling on her dogs, she swung down the hill, carrying, if you please, her shoulders squared and her head in the air like a young conceited birkie going to see his sweetheart.

And then, when the thing became public, what a din there was in the parish of Balmaghie! Only those who know the position of a young minister and the interest in his doings can imagine. It was somewhat thus that the good wives wagged their tongues.

“To marry Jean Gemmell! Aye, juist poor Jean, the shilpit, pewlin’ brat that never did a hand’s turn in her life, indoor or oot! Fegs, a bonny wife she will mak’ to him. Apothecaries’ drugs and red claret wine she maun hae to leeve on. A bonnie penny it will cost him, gin ever she wins to the threshold o’ his manse!

“But she’s no there yet, kimmer! Na—certes no! I mind o’ her mither weel. Jean was her name, too, juist sich anither ‘cloyt’—a feckless, white-faced bury-me-decent, withoot as muckle spirit as wad gar her turn a sow oot o’ the kail-yard. And a’ the kin o’ her were like her—no yin to better anither. There was her uncle Jacob Ahanny a’ the Risk; he keepit in wi’ the Government in the auld Persecution, and when Clavers cam’ to the door and asked him what religion he was o’, he said that the estate had changed hands lately, and that he hadna had time to speer at the new laird. And at that Clavers laughed and laughed, and it wasna often that Jockie Graham did the like. Fegs no, kimmers! But he clappit Jacob on the shooder. ‘Puir craitur,’ quo’ he; ‘ye are no the stuff that rebels are made o’. Na, there’s nocht o’ Richie Cameron aboot you.’”

“Aye, faith, do ye tell me, and Jean is to mairry the minister, and him sae bauld and croose before the Presbytery. What deil’s cantrip can hae ta’en him?”

“Hoot, Mary McKeand, I wonder to hear ye. Do ye no ken that the baulder and greater a man the easier a woman can get round him?”

“Aweel, even sae I hae heard. I wish oor Jock was a great man, then; I could maybe, keep him awa’ frae the change-hoose in the clachan. But the minister, he had far better hae ta’en yon wild sister——”

“Her? I’se warrant she wadna look at him. She doesna even gang to Balmaghie Kirk to hear him preach.”

“Mary McKeand, hae ye come to your age withoot kennin, that the woman that wad refuse the minister o’ a parish when he speers her, hasna been born?”

“Aweel, maybe no! But kimmer harken to me, there’s mony an egg laid in the nest that never leeved to craw in the morn. Him and her are no married yet. Hoot na, woman!”

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

And so without further eavesdropping I took my way out of the clachan of Pluckamin, and left the good wives to arrange my brother’s future. I had not yet spoken to him on the subject, but I resolved to do so that very night.

It was already well upon the grey selvage of the dark when I strode up the manse-loaning, intent to have the matter out with my brother forthwith. It was not often that I took it on me to question him; for after all I was but a landward lout by comparison with him. I understood little of the high aims and purposes that inspired him, being at best but a plain country lad with my wits a little sharpened by the giff-gaff of the pedlar’s trade. But when it came to the push I think that Quintin had some respect for my opinion—all the more that I so seldom troubled him with it.

I found my brother in the little gable-room where he studied, with the window open that he might hear the sough of the soft-flowing river beneath, and perhaps also that the drowsy hum of the bees and the sweet-sour smell of the hives might drift in to him upon the balmy air of night.

The minister had a great black-lettered book propped up before him, which from its upright thick and thin letters (like pea-sticks dibbled in the ground) I knew to be Hebrew. But I do not think he read in it, nor gathered much lear for his Sabbath’s sermon.

He looked up as I came in.

“Quintin,” said I, directly, lest by waiting I should lose courage, “are you to marry Jean Gemmell?”

He kept his eyes straight upon me, as indeed he did ever with whomsoever he spake.

“Aye, Hob,” he said, quietly; “have ye any word to say against that?”

“I do not know that I have,” I answered, “but what will Mary Gordon say?”

I could see him wince like one that is touched on an unhealed wound.

But he recovered himself at once, and said calmly, “She will say nothing, feel nothing, care nothing.”

“I am none so sure of that,” said I, looking as straightly at him as ever he did at me.

He started up, one hand on the table, his long hair thrown back with a certain jerk he had when he was touched, which made him look like a roused lion that stands at bay. “By what right do ye speak thus, Hob MacClellan?”

“By the right of that which I know,” said I; “but a man who will pull up the seed which he has just planted, and cast it away because he finds not ripened ears, deserves to starve all his life on sprouted and musty corn.”

“Riddle me no riddles,” said my brother, knocking on the table with his palm till the great Hebrew book slid from its prop and fell heavily to the floor; “this is too terrible a venture. Speak plainly and tell me all you mean.”

“Well,” said I, “the matter is not all mine to tell. But you are well aware that Hob MacClellan can hold his peace, and is no gossip-monger. I tell you that when you went from Earlstoun the last time the Lady Mary went to the battlement tower to watch you go, and came down with her kerchief wringing with her tears.”

“It is a thing impossible, mad, incredible!” said he, putting his elbow on the table and his hand to his eyes as if he had been looking into the glare of an overpowering sun. Yet there was hardly enough light in the little room for us to see one another by. After a long silence Quintin turned to me and said, “Tell me how ye came to ken this.”

“That,” said I, bluntly, “is not a matter that can concern you. But know it I do, or I should not have troubled you with the matter.”

At this he gave a wild kind of throat cry that I never heard before. It was the driven, throttled cry of a man’s agony, once heard, never forgotten. Would that Mary Gordon had hearkened to it! It is the one thing no woman can stand. It either melts or terrifies her. But with another man it is different.