“I canna just say that,” replied M’Brair. “But I rebuked her in the name of God, and she repented before me on her bended knees.”

  “Weel, I daursay she’s been ower far wi’ the dragoons,” said Haddo. “I never denied that. I ken naething by it.”

  “Man, you but show your nakedness the more plainly,” said M’Brair. “Poor, blind, besotted creature — and I see you stoytering on the brink of dissolution: your light out, and your hours numbered. Awake, man!” he shouted with a formidable voice, “awake, or it be ower late.”

  “Be damned if I stand this!” exclaimed Haddo, casting his tobacco-pipe violently on the table, where it was smashed in pieces. “Out of my house with ye, or I’ll call for the dragoons.”

  “The speerit of the Lord is upon me,” said M’Brair with solemn ecstasy. “I sist you to compear before the Great White Throne, and I warn you the summons shall be bloody and sudden.”

  And at this, with more agility than could have been expected, he got clear of the room and slammed the door behind him in the face of the pursuing curate. The next Lord’s day the curate was ill, and the kirk closed, but for all his ill words, Mr. M’Brair abode unmolested in the house of Montroymont.

  CHAPTER III

  THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE

  This was a bit of a steep broken hill that overlooked upon the west a moorish valley, full of ink-black pools. These presently drained into a burn that made off, with little noise and no celerity of pace, about the corner of the hill. On the far side the ground swelled into a bare heath, black with junipers, and spotted with the presence of the standing stones for which the place was famous. They were many in that part, shapeless, white with lichen — you would have said with age: and had made their abode there for untold centuries, since first the heathens shouted for their installation. The ancients had hallowed them to some ill religion, and their neighbourhood had long been avoided by the prudent before the fall of day; but of late, on the up-springing of new requirements, these lonely stones on the moor had again become a place of assembly. A watchful picket on the Hill-end commanded all the northern and eastern approaches; and such was the disposition of the ground, that by certain cunningly posted sentries the west also could be made secure against surprise: there was no place in the country where a conventicle could meet with more quiet of mind or a more certain retreat open, in the case of interference from the dragoons. The minister spoke from a knowe close to the edge of the ring, and poured out the words God gave him on the very threshold of the devils of yore. When they pitched a tent (which was often in wet weather, upon a communion occasion) it was rigged over the huge isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand, none knew why. And the congregation sat partly clustered on the slope below, and partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the turfy soil of the Ring itself. In truth the situation was well qualified to give a zest to Christian doctrines, had there been any wanted. But these congregations assembled under conditions at once so formidable and romantic as made a zealot of the most cold. They were the last of the faithful; God, who had averted His face from all other countries of the world, still leaned from heaven to observe, with swelling sympathy, the doings of His moorland remnant; Christ was by them with His eternal wounds, with dropping tears; the Holy Ghost (never perfectly realised nor firmly adopted by Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to be in the heart of each and on the lips of the minister. And over against them was the army of the hierarchies, from the men Charles and James Stuart, on to King Lewie and the Emperor; and the scarlet Pope, and the muckle black devil himself, peering out the red mouth of hell in an ecstasy of hate and hope. “One pull more!” he seemed to cry; “one pull more, and it’s done. There’s only Clydesdale and the Stewartry, and the three Bailiaries of Ayr, left for God.” And with such an august assistance of powers and principalities looking on at the last conflict of good and evil, it was scarce possible to spare a thought to those old, infirm, debile, ab agendo devils whose holy place they were now violating.

  There might have been three hundred to four hundred present. At least there were three hundred horses tethered for the most part in the ring; though some of the hearers on the outskirts of the crowd stood with their bridles in their hand, ready to mount at the first signal. The circle of faces was strangely characteristic; long, serious, strongly marked, the tackle standing out in the lean brown cheeks, the mouth set and the eyes shining with a fierce enthusiasm; the shepherd, the labouring man, and the rarer laird, stood there in their broad blue bonnets or laced hats, and presenting an essential identity of type. From time to time a long-drawn groan of adhesion rose in this audience, and was propagated like a wave to the outskirts, and died away among the keepers of the horses. It had a name; it was called “a holy groan.”

  A squall came up; a great volley of flying mist went out before it and whelmed the scene; the wind stormed with a sudden fierceness that carried away the minister’s voice and twitched his tails and made him stagger, and turned the congregation for a moment into a mere pother of blowing plaid-ends and prancing horses, and the rain followed and was dashed straight into their faces. Men and women panted aloud in the shock of that violent shower-bath; the teeth were bared along all the line in an involuntary grimace; plaids, mantles, and riding-coats were proved vain, and the worshippers felt the water stream on their naked flesh. The minister, reinforcing his great and shrill voice, continued to contend against and triumph over the rising of the squall and the dashing of the rain.

  “In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing cock,” he said; “and fifty mile and not get a light to your pipe; and an hundred mile and not see a smoking house. For there’ll be naething in all Scotland but deid men’s banes and blackness, and the living anger of the Lord. O, where to find a bield — O sirs, where to find a bield from the wind of the Lord’s anger? Do ye call this a wind? Bethankit! Sirs, this is but a temporary dispensation; this is but a puff of wind, this is but a spit of rain and by with it. Already there’s a blue bow in the west, and the sun will take the crown of the causeway again, and your things’ll be dried upon ye, and your flesh will be warm upon your bones. But O, sirs, sirs! for the day of the Lord’s anger!”

  His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a voice that sometimes crashed like cannon. Such as it was, it was the gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity. Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and redolent of the soil.

  A little before the coming of the squall there was a different scene enacting at the outposts. For the most part, the sentinels were faithful to their important duty; the Hill-end of Drumlowe was known to be a safe meeting-place; and the out-pickets on this particular day had been somewhat lax from the beginning, and grew laxer during the inordinate length of the discourse. Francie lay there in his appointed hiding-hole, looking abroad between two whin-bushes. His view was across the course of the burn, then over a piece of plain moorland, to a gap between two hills; nothing moved but grouse, and some cattle who slowly traversed his field of view, heading northward: he heard the psalms, and sang words of his own to the savage and melancholy music; for he had his own design in hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed in his bosom alternately, like the hot and the cold fit of an ague. Courage was uppermost during the singing, which he accompanied through all its length with this impromptu strain:

  “And I will ding Jock Crozer down

  No later than the day.”

  Presently the voice of the preacher came to him in wafts, at the wind’s will, as by the opening and shutting of a door; wild spasms of screaming, as of some undiscerned gigantic hill-bird stirred with inordinate passion, succeeded to intervals of silence; and Francie heard them with a critical ear. “Ay,” he thought at last, “he’ll do; he has the bit in his mou’ fairly.”

  He had observed that his friend, or rather his enemy, Jock Crozer, had been established at a very critical part of the line of outposts; namely, where the burn issues by an abrupt gorge from the semicircle of high moors. If anything was calculated to nerve him to battle it was this. The post was important; next to the Hill-end itself, it might be called the key to the position; and it was where the cover was bad, and in which it was most natural to place a child. It should have been Heathercat’s; why had it been given to Crozer? An exquisite fear of what should be the answer passed through his marrow every time he faced the question. Was it possible that Crozer could have boasted? that there were rumours abroad to his — Heathercat’s — discredit? that his honour was publicly sullied? All the world went dark about him at the thought; he sank without a struggle into the midnight pool of despair; and every time he so sank, he brought back with him — not drowned heroism indeed, but half-drowned courage by the locks. His heart beat very slowly as he deserted his station, and began to crawl towards that of Crozer. Something pulled him back, and it was not the sense of duty, but a remembrance of Crozer’s build and hateful readiness of fist. Duty, as he conceived it, pointed him forward on the rueful path that he was travelling. Duty bade him redeem his name if he were able, at the risk of broken bones; and his bones and every tooth in his head ached by anticipation. An awful subsidiary fear whispered him that if he were hurt, he should disgrace himself by weeping. He consoled himself, boy-like, with the consideration that he was not yet committed; he could easily steal over unseen to Crozer’s post, and he had a continuous private idea that he would very probably steal back again. His course took him so near the minister that he could hear some of his words: “What news, minister, of Claver’se? He’s going round like a roaring rampaging lion....

  THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

  A FRAGMENT

  CHAPTER I

  NANCE AT THE “GREEN DRAGON”

  CHAPTER II

  IN WHICH MR. ARCHER IS INSTALLED

  CHAPTER III

  JONATHAN HOLDAWAY

  CHAPTER IV

  MINGLING THREADS

  CHAPTER V

  LIFE IN THE CASTLE

  CHAPTER VI

  THE BAD HALF-CROWN

  CHAPTER VII

  THE BLEACHING-GREEN

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE MAIL GUARD

  CHAPTER I

  NANCE AT THE “GREEN DRAGON”

  Nance Holdaway was on her knees before the fire blowing the green wood that voluminously smoked upon the dogs, and only now and then shot forth a smothered flame; her knees already ached and her eyes smarted, for she had been some while at this ungrateful task, but her mind was gone far away to meet the coming stranger. Now she met him in the wood, now at the castle gate, now in the kitchen by candle-light; each fresh presentment eclipsed the one before; a form so elegant, manners so sedate, a countenance so brave and comely, a voice so winning and resolute — sure such a man was never seen! The thick-coming fancies poured and brightened in her head like the smoke and flames upon the hearth.

  Presently the heavy foot of her uncle Jonathan was heard upon the stair, and as he entered the room she bent the closer to her work. He glanced at the green fagots with a sneer, and looked askance at the bed and the white sheets, at the strip of carpet laid, like an island, on the great expanse of the stone floor, and at the broken glazing of the casement clumsily repaired with paper.

  “Leave that fire a-be,” he cried. “What, have I toiled all my life to turn innkeeper at the hind end? Leave it a-be, I say.”

  “La, uncle, it doesn’t burn a bit; it only smokes,” said Nance, looking up from her position.

  “You are come of decent people of both sides,” returned the old man. “Who are you to blow the coals for any Robin-run-agate? Get up, get on your hood, make yourself useful, and be off to the ‘Green Dragon.’”

  “I thought you was to go yourself,” Nance faltered.

  “So did I,” quoth Jonathan; “but it appears I was mistook.”

  The very excess of her eagerness alarmed her, and she began to hang back. “I think I would rather not, dear uncle,” she said. “Night is at hand, and I think, dear, I would rather not.”

  “Now you look here,” replied Jonathan, “I have my lord’s orders, have I not? Little he gives me, but it’s all my livelihood. And do you fancy, if I disobey my lord, I’m likely to turn round for a lass like you? No, I’ve that hell-fire of pain in my old knee, I wouldn’t walk a mile, not for King George upon his bended knees.” And he walked to the window and looked down the steep scarp to where the river foamed in the bottom of the dell.

  Nance stayed for no more bidding. In her own room, by the glimmer of the twilight, she washed her hands and pulled on her Sunday mittens; adjusted her black hood, and tied a dozen times its cherry ribbons; and in less than ten minutes, with a fluttering heart and excellently bright eyes, she passed forth under the arch and over the bridge, into the thickening shadows of the groves. A well-marked wheel-track conducted her. The wood, which upon both sides of the river dell was a mere scrambling thicket of hazel, hawthorn, and holly, boasted on the level of more considerable timber. Beeches came to a good growth, with here and there an oak; and the track now passed under a high arcade of branches, and now ran under the open sky in glades. As the girl proceeded these glades became more frequent, the trees began again to decline in size, and the wood to degenerate into furzy coverts. Last of all there was a fringe of elders; and beyond that the track came forth upon an open, rolling moorland, dotted with wind-bowed and scanty bushes, and all golden brown with the winter, like a grouse. Right over against the girl the last red embers of the sunset burned under horizontal clouds; the night fell clear and still and frosty, and the track in low and marshy passages began to crackle under foot with ice.

  Some half a mile beyond the borders of the wood the lights of the “Green Dragon” hove in sight, and running close beside them, very faint in the dying dusk, the pale ribbon of the Great North Road. It was the back of the post-house that was presented to Nance Holdaway; and as she continued to draw near and the night to fall more completely, she became aware of an unusual brightness and bustle. A post-chaise stood in the yard, its lamps already lighted: light shone hospitably in the windows and from the open door; moving lights and shadows testified to the activity of servants bearing lanterns. The clank of pails, the stamping of hoofs on the firm causeway, the jingle of harness, and, last of all, the energetic hissing of a groom, began to fall upon her ear. By the stir you would have thought the mail was at the door, but it was still too early in the night. The down mail was not due at the “Green Dragon” for hard upon an hour; the up mail from Scotland not before two in the black morning.

  Nance entered the yard somewhat dazzled. Sam, the tall ostler, was polishing a curb-chain with sand; the lantern at his feet letting up spouts of candle-light through the holes with which its conical roof was peppered.

  “Hey, miss,” said he jocularly, “you won’t look at me any more, now you have gentry at the castle.”

  Her cheeks burned with anger.

  “That’s my lord’s chay,” the man continued, nodding at the chaise, “Lord Windermoor’s. Came all in a fluster — dinner, bowl of punch, and put the horses to. For all the world like a runaway match, my dear — bar the bride. He brought Mr. Archer in the chay with him.”

  “Is that Holdaway?” cried the landlord from the lighted entry, where he stood shading his eyes.

  “Only me, sir,” answered Nance.

  “O, you, Miss Nance,” he said. “Well, come in quick, my pretty. My lord is waiting for your uncle.”

  And he ushered Nance into a room cased with yellow wainscot and lighted by tall candles, where two gentlemen sat at a table finishing a bowl of punch. One of these was stout, elderly, and irascible, with a face like a full moon, well dyed with liquor, thick tremulous lips, a short, purple hand, in which he brandished a long pipe, and an abrupt and gobbling utterance. This was my Lord Windermoor. In his companion Nance beheld a younger man, tall, quiet, grave, demurely dressed, and wearing his own hair. Her glance but lighted on him, and she flushed, for in that second she made sure that she had twice betrayed herself — betrayed by the involuntary flash of her black eyes her secret impatience to behold this new companion, and, what was far worse, betrayed her disappointment in the realisation of her dreams. He, meanwhile, as if unconscious, continued to regard her with unmoved decorum.

  “O, a man of wood,” thought Nance.

  “What — what?” said his lordship. “Who is this?”

  “If you please, my lord, I am Holdaway’s niece,” replied Nance, with a curtsey.

  “Should have been here himself,” observed his lordship. “Well, you tell Holdaway that I’m aground, not a stiver — not a stiver. I’m running from the beagles — going abroad, tell Holdaway. And he need look for no more wages: glad of ‘em myself, if I could get ‘em. He can live in the castle if he likes, or go to the devil. O, and here is Mr. Archer; and I recommend him to take him in — a friend of mine — and Mr. Archer will pay, as I wrote. And I regard that in the light of a precious good thing for Holdaway, let me tell you, and a set-off against the wages.”

  “But O, my lord!” cried Nance, “we live upon the wages, and what are we to do without?”

  “What am I to do? — what am I to do?” replied Lord Windermoor with some exasperation. “I have no wages. And there is Mr. Archer. And if Holdaway doesn’t like it, he can go to the devil, and you with him! — and you with him!”

  “And yet, my lord,” said Mr. Archer, “these good people will have as keen a sense of loss as you or I; keener, perhaps, since they have done nothing to deserve it.”