Heather and Snow

'Preserve 's, lassie! tak tent whaur ye cairry the bairn!' cried the mother. 'But, eh, tak him whaur ye like,' she substituted, correcting herself. 'Weel ken I ye'll tak him naegait but whaur it's weel he sud gang! The laddie needs twa mithers, and the Merciful has gien him the twa! Ye're full mair his mither nor me, Kirsty!'

She asked no more questions, but got them the candle and let them go. They hastened back, Steenie in his most jubilant mood, which seemed always to have in it a touch of deathly frost and a flash as of the primal fire. What could be the strange displacement or maladjustment which, in the brain harbouring the immortal thing, troubled it so, and made it yearn after an untasted liberty? The source of his jubilance now was easy to tell: the idea of the bonny man was henceforth, in that troubled brain of his, associated with the place into which they were about to descend.

The moment they reached the spot, Kirsty, to the renewed astonishment of Steenie, dived at once into the ground at her feet, and disappeared.

'Kirsty! Kirsty!' he cried out after her, and danced like a terrified child. Then he shook with a fresh dismay at the muffled sound that came back to him in answer from the unseen hollows of the earth.

Already Kirsty stood at the bottom of the sloping tunnel, and was lighting her candle. When it burned up, she found herself looking into a level gallery, the roof of which she could touch. It was not an excavation, but had been trenched from the surface, for it was roofed with great slabs of stone. Its sides, of rough stones, were six or seven feet apart at the floor, which was paved with small boulders, but sloped so much toward each other that at the top their distance was less by about two and a half feet. Kirsty was, as I have said, a keen observer, and her power of seeing had been greatly developed through her constant conscientious endeavour to realize every description she read.

She went on about ten or twelve yards, and came to a bend in the gallery, succeeded by a sort of chamber, whence branched a second gallery, which soon came to an end. The place was in truth not unlike a catacomb, only its two galleries were built, and much wider than the excavated thousands in the catacombs. She turned back to the entrance, there left her candle alight, and again startled Steenie, still staring into the mouth of the hole, with her sudden reappearance.

'Wud ye like to come doon, Steenie?' she said. 'It's a queer place.'

'Is 't awfu' fearsome?' asked Steenie, shrinking.

His feeling of dismay at the cavernous, the terrene dark, was not inconsistent with his pleasure in being out on the wild waste hillside, when heaven and earth were absolutely black, not seldom the whole of the night, in utter loneliness to eye or ear, and his never then feeling anything like dread. Then and there only did he seem to have room enough. His terror was of the smallest pressure on his soul, the least hint at imprisonment. That he could not rise and wander about among the stars at his will, shaped itself to him as the heaviness of his feet holding him down. His feet were the loaded gyves that made of the world but a roomy prison. The limitless was essential to his conscious wellbeing.

'No a bittock,' answered Kirsty, who felt awe anywhere—on hilltop, in churchyard, in sunlit silent room—but never fear. 'It's as like the place I was tellin ye aboot—'

'Ay, the cat-place!' interrupted Steenie.

'The place wi' the pictur,' returned Kirsty.

Steenie darted forward, shot head-first into the hole as he had seen Kirsty do, and crept undismayed to the bottom of the slope. Kirsty followed close behind, but he was already on his feet when she joined him. He grasped her arm eagerly, his face turned from her, and his eyes gazing fixedly into the depth of the gallery, lighted so vaguely by the candle on the floor of its entrance.

'I think I saw him!' he said in a whisper full of awe and delight. 'I think I did see him!—but, Kirsty, hoo am I to be sure 'at I saw him?'

'Maybe ye did and maybe ye didna see him,' replied Kirsty; 'but that disna metter sae muckle, for he's aye seem you; and ye'll see him, and be sure 'at ye see him, whan the richt time comes.'

'Ye div think that, Kirsty?'

'Ay div I,' returned Kirsty, confidently.

'I s' wait,' answered Steenie, and in silence followed Kirsty along the gallery.

This was Steenie's first, and all but his last descent into the earth-house, or Picts' House, or weem, as a place of the sort is called: there are many such in the east of Scotland, their age and origin objects of merest conjecture. The moment he was out of it, he fled to the Horn.

The next Sunday he heard read at church the story of the burial and resurrection of the Lord, and unavoidably after their talk about the catacombs, associated the chamber they had just discovered with the tomb in which 'they laid him,' at the same time concluding the top of the hill, where he had, as he believed, on certain favoured nights met the bonny man, the place whence he ascended—to come again as Steenie thought he did! The earth-house had no longer any attraction for Steenie: the bonny man was not there; he was risen! He was somewhere above the mountain-top haunted by Steenie, and that he sometimes descended upon it Steenie already knew, for had he not seen him there!

Happy Steenie! Happier than so many Christians who, more in their brain-senses, but far less in their heart-senses than he, haunt the sepulchre as if the dead Jesus lay there still, and forget to walk the world with him who dieth no more, the living one!

But his sister took a great liking to the place, nor was repelled by her mistaken suspicion that there the people of the land in times unknown had buried some of their dead. In the hot days, when the earth-house was cool, and in the winter when the thick blanket of the snow lay over it, and it felt warm as she entered it from the frosty wind, she would sit there in the dark, sometimes imagining herself one of the believers of the old time, thinking the Lord was at hand, approaching in person to fetch her and her friends. When the spring came, she carried down sod and turf, and made for herself a seat in the central chamber, there to sit and think. By and by she fastened an oil lamp to the wall, and would light its rush-pith-wick, and read by it. Occasionally she made a good peat fire, for she had found a chimney that went sloping into the upper air; and if it did not always draw well, peat-smoke is as pleasant as wholesome, and she could bear a good deal of its smothering. Not unfrequently she carried her book there when no one was likely to want her, and enjoyed to the full the rare and delightful sense of absolute safety from interruption. Sometimes she would make a little song there, with which as she made it its own music would come, and she would model the air with her voice as she wrote the words in a little book on her knee.

CHAPTER XIII

A VISIT FROM FRANCIS GORDON

The summer following Gordon's first session at college, castle Weelset and Corbyknowe saw nothing of him. No one missed him much, and but for his father's sake no one would have thought much about him. Kirsty, as one who had told him the truth concerning himself, thought of him oftener than anyone except her father.

The summer after, he paid a short visit to castle Weelset, and went one day to Corbyknowe, where he left a favourable impression upon all, which impression Kirsty had been the readier to receive because of the respect she felt for him as a student. The old imperiousness which made him so unlike his father had retired into the background; his smile, though not so sweet, came oftener; and his carriage was full of courtesy. But something was gone which his old friends would gladly have seen still. His behaviour in the old time was not so pleasant, but he had been as one of the family. Often disagreeable, he was yet loving. Now, he laid himself out to make himself acceptable as a superior. Freed so long from his mother's lowering influences, what was of his father in him might by this time have come more to the surface but for certain ladies in Edinburgh, connections of the family, who, influenced by his good looks and pleasant manners, and possibly by his position in the Gordon country, sought his favour by deeds of flattery, and succeeded in spoiling him not a little.

Steenie happening to be about the house when he came, Francis behaved to him so kindly that the gentle creature, overcome with grateful delight, begged him to go and see a house he and Kirsty were building.

In some families the games of the children mainly consist in the construction of dwellings, of this kind or that—castle, or ship, or cave, or nest in the treetop—according to the material attainable. It is an outcome of the aboriginal necessity for shelter, this instinct of burrowing: Welbeck Abbey is the development of a weem or Picts' house. Steenie had very early shown it, probably from a vague consciousness of weakness, and Kirsty came heartily to his aid in following it, with the reaction of waking in herself a luxurious idea of sheltered safety. Northern children cherish in their imaginations the sense of protection more, I fancy, than others. This is partly owing to the severity of their climate, the snow and wind, the rain and sleet, the hail and darkness they encounter. I doubt whether an English child can ever have such a sense of protection as a Scots bairn in bed on a winter night, his mother in the nursery, and the wind howling like a pack of wolves about the house.

Francis consented to go with Steenie to see his house, and Kirsty naturally accompanied them. By this time she had gathered the little that was known, and there is very little known yet, concerning Picts' houses, and as they went it occurred to her that it would be pleasant to the laird to be shown a thing on his own property of which he had never heard, and which, in the eyes of some, would add to its value. She took the way, therefore, that led past the weem.

She had so well cleared out its entrance, that it was now comparatively easy of access, else I doubt if the young laird would have risked the spoiling of his admirably fitting clothes to satisfy the mild curiosity he felt regarding Kirsty's discovery. As it was, he pulled off his coat before entering, despite her assurance that he 'needna fear blaudin onything.'

She went in before him to light her candle and he followed. As she showed him the curious place, she gave him the results of her reading about such constructions, telling him who had written concerning them, and what they had written. 'There's mair o' them, I gether,' she said, 'and mair remarkable anes, in oor ain coonty nor in ony ither in Scotlan'. I hae mysel seen nane but this.' Then she told him how Steenie had led the way to its discovery. By the time she ended, Gordon was really interested—chiefly, no doubt, in finding himself possessor of a thing which many men, learned and unlearned, would think worth coming to see.

'Did you find this in it?' he asked, seating himself on her little throne of turf.

'Na; I put that there mysel,' answered Kirsty. 'There was naething intil the place, jist naething ava! There was naething ye cud hae pickit aff o' the flure. Gien it hadna been oot o' the gait o' the win', ye wud hae thoucht it had sweepit it clean. Ye cud hae tellt by naething intil't what ever it was meant for, hoose or byre or barn, kirk or kirkyard. It had been jist a hidy-hole in troubled times, whan the cuintry wud be swarmin wi' stravaguin marauders!'

'What made ye the seat for, Kirsty?' asked Gordon, calling her by her name for the first time, and falling into the mother tongue with a flash of his old manner.

'I come here whiles,' she answered, 'to be my lane and read a bit. It's sae quaiet. Eternity seems itsel to come and hide in 't whiles. I'm tempit whiles to bide a' nicht.'

'Isna 't awfu' cauld?'

'Na, no aften that. It's fine and warm i' the winter. And I can licht a fire whan I like.—But ye hae na yer coat on, Francie! I oucht na to hae latten ye bide sae lang!'

He shivered, rose, and made his way out. Steenie stood in the sunlight waiting for them.

'Why, Steenie,' said Gordon, 'you brought me to see your house: why didn't you come in with me?'

'Na, na! I'm feart for my feet: this is no my hoose!' answered Steenie. 'I'm biggin ane. Kirsty's helpin me: I cudna big a hoose wantin Kirsty! That's what I wud hae ye see, no this ane. This is Kirsty's hoose. It was Kirsty wantit ye to see this ane.—Na, it's no mine,' he added reflectively. 'I ken I maun come til 't some day, but I s' bide oot o' 't as lang's I can. I like the hill a heap better.'

'What does he mean?' asked Francis, turning to Kirsty.

'Ow, he has a heap o' notions o' 's ain!' answered Kirsty, who did not care, especially in his presence, to talk about her brother save to those who loved him.

When Francis turned again, he saw Steenie a good way up the hill.

'Where does he want to take me, Kirsty? Is it far?' he asked.

'Ay, it's a gey bitty; it's nearhan' at the tap o' the Horn, a wee ayont it.'

'Then I think I shall not go,' returned Francis. 'I will come another day.'

'Steenie! Steenie!' cried Kirsty, 'he'll no gang the day. He maun gang hame. He says he'll come anither time. Haud ye awa on to yer hoose; I s' be wi' ye by and by.'

Steenie went up the hill, and Kirsty and Francis walked toward Corbyknowe.

'Has no young man appeared yet to put Steenie's nose out of joint, Kirsty?' asked Gordon.

Kirsty thought the question rude, but answered, with quiet dignity, 'No ane. I never had muckle opinion o' yoong men, and dinna care aboot their company.—But what are ye thinkin o' duin yersel—I mean, whan ye're throu wi' the college?' she continued. 'Ye'll surely be comin hame to tak things intil yer ain han'? My father says whiles he's some feart they're no bein made the maist o'.'

'The property must look after itself, Kirsty. I will be a soldier like my father. If it could do without him when he was in India, it may just as well do without me. As long as my mother lives, she shall do what she likes with it.'

Thus talking, and growing more friendly as they went, they walked slowly back to the house. There Francis mounted his horse and rode away, and for more than two years they saw nothing of him.

CHAPTER XIV

STEENIE'S HOUSE

Steenie seemed always to experience a strange sort of terror while waiting for anyone to come out of the weem, into which he never entered; and it was his repugnance to the place that chiefly moved him to build a house of his own. He may have also calculated on being able, with such a refuge at hand, to be on the hill in all weathers. They still made use of their little hut as before, and Kirsty still kept her library in it, but it was at the root of the Horn, and Steenie loved the peak of it more than any other spot in his narrow world.

I have already said that when, on the occasion of its discovery, Steenie, for the first and the last time, came out of the weem, he fled to the Horn. There he roamed for hours, possessed with the feeling that he had all but lost Kirsty who had taken possession of a house into which he could never accompany her. For himself he would like a house on the very top of the Horn, not one inside it!

Near the top was a little scoop out of the hill, sheltered on all sides except the south, which, the one time I saw it, reminded me strongly of Dante's grembo in the purgatorial hill, where the upward pilgrims had to rest outside the gate, because of the darkness during which no man could go higher. Here, it is true, were no flowers to weave a pattern upon its carpet of green; true also, here were no beautiful angels, in green wings and green garments, poised in the sweet night-air, watchful with their short, pointless, flaming swords against the creeping enemy; but it was, nevertheless, the loveliest carpet of grass and moss, and as to the angels, I find it impossible to imagine, even in the heavenly host, one heart more guardant than that of Kirsty, one truer, or more devoted to its charge. The two were together as the child of earth, his perplexities and terrors ever shot through with flashes of insight and hope, and the fearless, less imaginative, confident angel, appointed to watch and ward and see him safe through the loose-cragged mountain-pass to the sunny vales beyond.

On the northern slope of the hollow, full in the face of the sun, a little family of rocks had fallen together, odd in shapes and positions but of long stable equilibrium, with narrow spaces between them. The sun was throwing his last red rays among these rocks when Steenie the same evening wandered into the little valley. The moment his eyes fell upon them, he said in his heart, 'Yon's the place for a hoose! I'll get Kirsty to big ane, and mebbe she 'll come and bide in 't wi' me whiles!'

In his mind there were for some years two conflicting ideas of refuge, one embodied in the heathery hut with Kirsty, the other typified by the uplifted loneliness, the air and the space of the mountain upon which the bonny man sometimes descended: for the last three years or more the latter idea had had the upper hand: now it seemed possible to have the two kinds of refuge together, where the more material would render the more spiritual easier of attainment! Such were not Steenie's words; indeed he used none concerning the matter; but such were his vague thoughts—feelings rather, not yet thoughts.

The spot had indeed many advantages. For one thing, the group of rocks was the ready skeleton of the house Steenie wanted. Again, if the snow sometimes lay deeper there than in other parts of the hill, there first it began to melt. A third advantage was that, while, as I have said, the valley was protected by higher ground everywhere but on the south, it there afforded a large outlook over the boggy basin and over the hills beyond its immediate rim, to a horizon in which stood some of the loftier peaks of the highland mountains.

When Steenie's soul was able for a season to banish the nameless forms that haunt the dim borders of insanity, he would sit in that valley for hours, regarding the wider-spread valley below him, in which he knew every height and hollow, and, with his exceptionally keen sight, he could descry signs of life where another would have beheld but an everyway dead level. Not a live thing, it seemed almost, could spread wing or wag tail, but Steenie would become thereby aware of its presence. Kirsty, boastful to her parents of the faculty of Steenie, said to her father one day,

'I dinna believe, father, wi' Steenie on the bog, a reid worm cud stick up his heid oot o' 't ohn him seen 't!'

'I'm thinkin that's no sayin over muckle, wuman!' returned David. 'I never jist set mysel to luik, but I dinna think I ever did tak notice o' a worm settin up that heid o' his oot o' a bog. I dinna think it's a sile they care aboot. I kenna what they would get to please them there. It's the yerd they live upo'. Whaur craps winna grow, I doobt gien worms can live.'

Kirsty laughed: she had made herself ridiculous, but the ridicule of some is sweeter than the praise of others.

Steenie set about his house-building at once, and when he had got as far as he could without her, called for help from Kirsty, who never interfered with, and never failed him. Divots he was able to cut, and of them he provided a good quantity, but when it came to moving stones, two pairs of hands were often wanted. Indeed, before the heavier work of 'Steenie's hoosie' was over, the two had to beg the help of more—of their father, and of men from the farm.

During its progress, Phemy Craig paid rather a lengthened visit to Corbyknowe, and often joined the two in their labour on the Horn. She was not very strong, but would carry a good deal in the course of the day; and through this association with Steenie, her dread of him gradually vanished, and they became comrades.

When Steenie's design was at length carried out, they had built up with stone and lime the open spaces between several of the rocks; had cased these curtain-walls outside and lined them inside with softer and warmer walls of fells or divots cut from the green sod of the hill; and had covered in the whole as they found it possible—very irregularly no doubt, but smoothing up all the corners and hollows with turf and heather. This done, one of the men who was a good thatcher, fastened the whole roof down with strong lines, so that the wind should not get under and strip it off. The result was a sort of burrow, consisting of several irregular compartments with open communication—or rather, perhaps, of a single chamber composed of recesses. One small rock they included quite: Steenie would make it serve for a table, and some of its inequalities for shelves. In one of the compartments or recesses, they contrived a fireplace, and in another a tolerably well concealed exit; for Steenie, like a trap-door-spider, could not endure the thought of only one way out: one way was enough for getting in, but two were needful for getting out, his best refuge being the open hill.

The night came at length when Steenie, in whose heart was a solemn, silent jubilation, would take formal possession of his house. It was soft and warm, in the middle of the month of July. The sun had been set about an hour when he got up to leave the parlour, where the others always sat in the summer, and where Steenie would now and then appear among them. As usual he said goodnight to no one of them, but stole gently out.

Kirsty knew what was in his mind, but was careful not to show that she took any heed of his departure. As soon as her father and mother retired, however, when he had been gone about half an hour, she put aside her work, and hastened out. She felt a little anxious about him, though she could not have said why. She had no dread of displeasing by rejoining him; nothing, but a sight of the bonny man could, she knew, give him more delight than having her to share his night-watch with him. This she had done several times, and they were the only occasions on which, so far as he could tell, he had slept any part of the night.

Folded in the twilight, Earth lay as still and peaceful as if she had never done any wrong, never seen anything wrong in one of her children. There was light everywhere, and darkness everywhere to make it strange. A pale green gleam prevailed in the heavens, as if the world were a glow-worm that sent abroad its home-born radiance into space, and coloured the sky. In the green light rested a few small solid clouds with sharp edges, and almost an assertion of repose. Throughout the night it would be no darker! The sun seemed already to have begun to rise, only he would be all night about it. From the door she saw the point of the Horn clear against the green sky: Steenie would be up there soon! he was hurrying thither! Sometimes he went very leisurely, stopping and gazing, or sitting down to meditate: he would not do so that night! A special solemnity in his countenance made her sure that he would go straight to his new house. But she could walk faster than he, and would not be long behind him!

The sky was full of pale stars, and Kirsty amused herself, as she went, with arranging them—not into their constellations, though she knew the shapes and names of most of them, but into mathematical figures. The only star Steenie knew by name was the pole star, which, however, he always called The bonny man's lantern. Kirsty believed he had thoughts of his own about many another, and a name for it too.

She had climbed the hill, and was drawing near the house, when she was startled by a sound of something like singing, and stopped to listen. She had never heard Steenie attempt to sing, and the very thought of his doing so moved her greatly: she was always expecting something marvellous to show itself in him. She drew nearer. It was not singing, but it was something like it, or something trying to be like it—a succession of broken, harsh, imperfect sounds, with here and there a tone of brief sweetness. She thought she perceived in it an attempt at melody, but the many notes that refused to be made, prevented her from finding the melody intended, or the melody, rather, after which he was feeling. The broken music ceased suddenly, and a different kind of sound succeeded. She went yet nearer. He could not be reading: she had tried to teach him to read, but the genuine effort he put forth to learn made his head ache, and his eyes feel wild, he said, and she at once gave up the endeavour. When she reached the door, she could plainly hear him praying.