A PLEASAUNCE.
The General read Morning Prayers in brief, omitting the Psalms and
lessons, and then after breakfast, with much gossip and ancient stories
from Donald, the father and daughter went out to survey their domain,
and though there be many larger, yet there can be few more romantic in
the north. That Carnegie had a fine eye and a sense of things who, out
of all the Glen--for the Hays had little in Drumtochty in those
days--fastened on the site of the Lodge and planted three miles of
wood, birch and oak, and beech and ash, with the rowan tree, along the
river that goes out and in seven times in that distance, so that his
descendants might have a fastness for their habitation and their
children might grow up in kindly woods on which the south sun beats
from early spring till late autumn, and within the sight and sound of
clean, running water. No wonder they loved their lonely home with
tenacious hearts, and left it only because it was in their blood to be
fighting. They had been out at Langside and Philiphaugh, in the '15
and the '45, and always on the losing side. The Lodge had never been
long without a young widow and a fatherless lad, but family history had
no warning for him--in fact, seemed rather to be an inspiration in the
old way--for no sooner had the young laird loved and married than he
would hear of another rebellion, and ride off some morning to fight for
that ill-fated dynasty whose love was ever another name for death.
There was always a Carnegie ready as soon as the white cockade appeared
anywhere in Scotland, and each of the house fought like the men before
him, save that he brought fewer at his back and had less in his pocket.
Little was left to the General and our Kate, and then came the great
catastrophe that lost them the Lodge, and so the race has now neither
name nor house in Scotland, save in the vault in Drumtochty Kirk. It
is a question whether one is wise to revisit any place where he has
often been in happier times and see it desolate. For me, at least, it
was a mistake, and the melancholy is still upon me. The deserted house
falling at last to pieces, the over-grown garden, the crumbling paths,
the gaping bridges over the little burns, and the loneliness, chilled
one's soul. There was no money to spare in the General's time, but it
is wonderful what one gardener, who has no hours, and works for love's
sake, can do, even in a place that needed half a dozen. Then he was
assisted unofficially by Donald, who declared that working in the woods
was "fery healthy and good for one or two small cuts I happened to get
in India," and Kate gave herself to the garden. The path by the river
was kept in repair, and one never knew when Kate might appear round the
corner. Once I had come down from the cottage on a fine February day
to see the snowdrops in the sheltered nooks, for there were little
dells white as snow at that season in Tochty woods, and Kate, hearing
that I had passed, came of her kindness to take me back to luncheon.
She had on a jacket of sealskin that we greatly admired, and a felt hat
with three grouse feathers on the side, and round her throat a red
satin scarf. The sun was shining on the bend of the path, and she came
into the light singing "Jack o' Hazeldean," walking, as Kate ever did
in song, with a swinging step like soldiers on a march. It seemed to
me that day that she was born to be the wife either of a noble or a
soldier, and I still wish at times within my heart she were Countess of
Kilspindie, for then the Lodge had been a fair sight to-day, and her
father had died in his own room. And other times I have imagined
myself Kilspindie, who was then Lord Hay, and questioned whether I
should have ordered Tochty to be dismantled and left a waste as it is
this day, and would have gone away to the wars, or would not have loved
to keep it in order for her sake, and visited it in the springtime when
the primroses are out, and the autumn when the leaves are blood-red.
Then I declare that Hay, being of a brave stock, and having acted as a
man of honour--for that is known to all now--ought to have put a good
face on his disappointment; but all the time I know one man who would
have followed Lord Hay's suit, and who regrets that he ever again saw
Tochty Lodge.
[Illustration: One gardener who . . . works for love's sake.]
"First of all," said the General as they sallied forth, "we shall go to
the Beeches, and see a view for which one might travel many days, and
pay a ransom."
So they went out into the court with its draw-well, from which they
must needs have a draught. Suddenly the General laid down the cup like
a man in sudden pain, for he was thinking of Cawnpore, and they passed
quickly through the gateway and turned into a path that wound among
great trees that had been planted, it was said, by the Carnegie who
rode with Montrose. They were walking on a plateau stretching out
beyond the line of the Lodge, and therefore commanding the Glen, if one
had eyes to see and the trees were not in the way. Kate laid her hand
on the General's arm beneath an ancient beech, and they stood in
silence to receive the blessing of the place, for surely never is the
soul so open to the voice of nature as by the side of running water and
in the heart of a wood. The fretted sunlight made shifting figures of
brightness on the ground; above the innumerable leaves rustled and
whispered; a squirrel darted along a branch and watched the intruders
with bright, curious eyes; the rooks cawed from the distance; the
pigeons cooed in sweet, sad cadence close at hand. They sat down on
the bare roots at their feet and yielded themselves to the genius of
the forest--the god who will receive the heart torn and distracted by
the fierce haste and unfinished labours and vain ambitions of life, and
will lay its fever to rest and encompass it with the quietness of
eternity.
"Father," whispered Kate, after a while, as one wishing to share
confidences, for there must be something to tell, "where are you?"
"You wish to know? Well, all day I 've been fishing down the stream,
and am coming home, very tired, very dirty, very happy, and I meet my
mother just outside those trees. I am boasting of the fish that I have
caught, none of which, I 'm sure, can be less than half a pound. She
is rating me for my appearance and beseeching me to keep at a distance.
Then I go home and down into the vaulted kitchen, where Janet's mother
gives me joyous welcome, and produces dainties saved from dinner for my
eating. The trouts are now at biggest only a quarter of a pound, for
they have to be cooked as a final course, but those that were hooked
and escaped are each a pound, except one in the hole below Lynedoch
Bridge, which was two pounds to an ounce. Afterwards I make a brave
attempt to rehearse the day in the gunroom to Sandie, who first taught
me to cast a line, and fall fast asleep, and, being shaken up, sneak
off to bed, creeping slowly up the stair, where the light is falling,
to the little room above yours, where, as I am falling over, I seem to
hear my mother's voice as in this sighing of the wind. Ah me, what a
day it was! And you, Kit?"
"Oh, I was back in the convent with my nuns, and Sister Flora was
trying to teach me English grammar in good French, and I was correcting
her in bad French, and she begins to laugh because it is all so droll.
'I am Scotch, and I teach you English all wrong, and you tell me what I
ought to say in French which is all wrong; let us go into the garden,'
for she was a perfect love, and always covered my faults. I am sitting
in the arbour, and the Sister brings a pear that has fallen. 'I do not
think it is wicked,' she says, and I say it is simply a duty to eat up
fallen pears, and we laugh again. As we sit, they are singing in the
chapel, and I hear 'Ave Maria, ora pro nobis.' Then I think of you,
and the tears will come to my eyes, and I try to hide my face, but the
Sister understands and comforts me. 'Your father is a gallant
gentleman, and the good God pities you, and will keep him in danger,'
and I fondle the Sister, and wonder whether any more pears have fallen.
How peaceful it is within that high wall, which is rough and forbidding
outside, but inside it is hung with greenery, and among the leaves I
see pears and peaches. But I missed you, dad," and Kate touched her
father, for they had a habit of just touching each other gently when
together.
"Do you really think we have been in India, and that you have a dozen
medals, and I am . . . an old maid?"
"Certainly not, Kit, a mere invention--we are boy and girl, and . . .
we 'll go on to the view."
Suddenly they came out from the shade into a narrow lane of light,
where some one of the former time, with an eye and a soul, had cleared
a passage among the trees, so that one standing at the inner end and
looking outwards could see the whole Glen, while the outstretched
branches of the beeches shaded his eyes. Morning in the summer-time
about five o'clock was a favourable hour, because one might see the
last mists lift, and the sun light up the face of Ben Urtach, and
evening-tide was better, because the Glen showed wonderfully tender in
the soft light, and the Grampians were covered with glory. But it was
best to take your first view towards noon, for then you could trace the
Tochty upwards as it appeared and reappeared, till it was lost in woods
at the foot of Glen Urtach, with every spot of interest on either side.
Below the kirk it ran broad and shallow, with a bank of brushwood on
one side and a meadow on the other, fringed with low bushes from behind
which it was possible to drop a fly with some prospects of success,
while in quite unprotected situations the Drumtochty fish laughed at
the tempter, and departed with contemptuous whisks of the tail. Above
the haughs was a little mill, where flax was once spun and its lade
still remained, running between the Tochty and the steep banks down
which the glen descended to the river. Opposite this mill the Tochty
ran with strength, escaping from the narrows of the bridge, and there
it was that Weelum MacLure drove across Sir George in safety, because
the bridge was not for use that day. Whether that bridge was really
built by Marshall Wade in his great work of pacifying the Highlands is
very far from certain, but Drumtochty did not relish any trifling with
its traditions, and had a wonderful pride in its solitary bridge, as
well it might, since from the Beeches nothing could well be more
picturesque. Its plan came nearly to an inverted V, and the apex was
just long enough to allow the horses to rest after the ascent, before
they precipitated themselves down the other side. During that time the
driver leant on the ledge, and let his eye run down the river, taking
in the Parish Kirk above and settling on the Lodge, just able to be
seen among the trees where the Tochty below turned round the bend.
What a Drumtochty man thought on such occasions he never told, but you
might have seen even Whinnie nod his head with emphasis. The bridge
stood up clear of banks and woods, grey, uncompromising,
unconventional, yet not without some grace of its own in its high arch
and abrupt descents. One with good eyes and a favouring sun could see
the water running underneath, and any one caught its sheen higher up,
before a wood came down to the water's edge and seemed to swallow up
the stream. Above the wood it is seen again, with a meal mill on the
Tochty left nestling in among the trees, and one would call it the
veriest burn, but it was there that Posty lost his life to save a
little child. And then it dwindles into the thinnest thread of silver,
and at last is seen no more from the beeches. From the Tochty the eye
makes its raids on north and south. The dark, massy pine-woods on the
left side of the glen are broken at intervals by fields as they
threaten to come down upon the river, and their shelter lends an air of
comfort and warmth to the glen. On the right the sloping land is
tilled from the bank above the river up to the edge of the moor that
swells in green and purple to the foot of the northern rampart of
mountains, but on this side also the glen here and there breaks into
belts of fir, which fling their kindly arms round the scattered
farm-houses, and break up the monotony of green and gold with squares
of dark green foliage and the brown of the tall, bare trunks. Between
the meandering stream and the cultivated land and the woods and the
heather and the distant hills, there was such a variety as cannot be
often gathered into the compass of one landscape.
[Illustration: Among the great trees.]
"And all our own," cried Kate in exultation; "let us congratulate
ourselves."
"I only wish it were, lassie. Why, did n't you understand we have only
these woods and a few acres of ploughed land now?"
"You stupid old dad; I begin to believe that you have had no education.
Of course the Hays have got the land, but we have the view and the joy
of it. This is the only place where one can say to a stranger, 'Behold
Drumtochty,' and he will see it at a flash and at its best."
"You 're brighter than your father, Kit, and a contented lassie to
boot, and for that word I'll take you straight to the Pleasaunce."
"What a charming name; it suggests a fairy world, with all sorts of
beautiful things and people."
"Quite right, Kit"--leading the way down to a hollow, surrounded by
wood and facing the sun, the General opened a door in an ivy-covered
wall--"for there is just one Pleasaunce on the earth, and that is a
garden."
It had been a risk to raise certain people's expectations and then
bring them into Tochty garden, for they can be satisfied with no place
that has not a clean-shaven lawn and beds of unvarying circles,
pyrethrum, calceolaria, and geranium, and brakes of rare roses, and
glass-houses with orchids worth fifty pound each, which is a garden in
high life, full of luxury, extravagance, weariness. As Kate entered, a
moss rose which wandered at its will caught her skirt, and the General
cut a blossom which she fastened in her breast, and surely there is no
flower so winsome and fragrant as this homely rose.
"Like yourself, Miss Carnegie," and the General rallied his simple wit
for the occasion, "very sweet and true, with a thorn, too, if one
gripped it the wrong way."
Whereat he made believe to run, and had the better speed because there
were no gravel walks with boxwood borders here, but alleys of old turf
that were pleasant both to the touch and the eye. In the centre where
all the ways met he capitulated with honours of war, and explained that
he had intended to compare Kate to a violet, which was her natural
emblem, but had succumbed to the temptation of her eyes, "which make
men wicked, Kit, with the gleam that is in them."
"Is n't it a tangle?" Which it was, and no one could look upon it
without keen delight, unless he were a horticultural pedant in whom the
appreciation of nature had been killed by parterres. There was some
principle of order, and even now, when the Pleasaunce is a wilderness,
the traces can be found. A dwarf fruit tree stood at every corner, and
between the trees a three-foot border of flowers kept the peas and
potatoes in their places. But the borders were one sustained,
elaborate, glorified disorder. There were roses of all kinds that have
ever gladdened poor gardens and simple hearts--yellow tea roses, moss
roses with their firm, shapely buds, monthly roses that bore nearly all
the year in a warm spot, the white briar that is dear to north country
people, besides standards in their glory, with full round purple
blossom. Among the roses, compassing them about and jostling one
another, some later, some earlier in bloom, most of them together in
the glad summer days, one could find to his hand wall-flowers and
primroses, sweet-william and dusty-miller, daisies red and white,
forget-me-nots and pansies, pinks and carnations, marigolds and phloxes
of many varieties. The confusion of colours was preposterous, and
showed an utter want of aesthetic sense. In fact, one may confess that
the Lodge garden was only one degree removed from the vulgarity and
prodigality of nature. There was no taste, no reserve, no harmony
about that garden. Nature simply ran riot and played according to her
will like a child of the former days, bursting into apple blossom and
laburnum gold and the bloom of peas and the white strawberry flower in
early summer, and then, later in the year, weaving garlands of blazing
red, yellow, white, purple, round beds of stolid roots and brakes of
currant bushes. There was a copper beech, where the birds sang, and
from which they raided the fruit with the skill of Highland caterans.
The Lodge bees lived all day in this garden, save when they went to
reinforce their sweetness from the heather bloom. The big trees stood
round the place and covered it from every wind except the south, and
the sun was ever blessing it. There was one summer-house, a mass of
honeysuckle, and there they sat down as those that had come back to
Eden from a wander year.
"Well, Kit?"
"Thank God for our Pleasaunce." And they would have stayed for hours,
but there was one other spot that had a fascination for the General
neither years nor wars had dulled, and he, who was the most
matter-of-fact and romantic of men, must see and show it to his
daughter before they ceased.
"A mile and more, Kit, but through the woods and by the water all the
way."
Sometimes they went down a little ravine made by a small burn fighting
and wearing its way for ages to the Tochty, and stood on a bridge of
two planks and a handrail thrown over a tiny pool, where the water was
resting on a bed of small pebbles. The oak copse covered the sides of
the tiny glen and met across the streamlet, and one below could see
nothing but greenery and the glint of the waterfall where the burn
broke into the bosky den from the bare heights above. Other times the
path, that allowed two to walk abreast if they wished very much and
kept close together, would skirt the face of the high river bank, and
if you peeped down through the foliage of the clinging trees you could
see the Tochty running swiftly, and the overhanging branches dipping in
their leaves. Then the river would make a sweep and forsake its bank,
leaving a peninsula of alluvial land between, where the geranium and
the hyacinth and the iris grew in deep, moist soil. One of these was
almost clear of wood and carpeted with thick, soft turf, and the river
beside it was broad and shining.
"We shall go down here," said the General, "and I will show you
something that I count the finest monument in Perthshire, or maybe in
broad Scotland."
In the centre of the sward, with trees just touching it with the tips
of their branches, was a little square, with a simple weather-beaten
railing. And the General led Kate to the spot, and stood for a while
in silence.
"Two young Scottish lassies, Kate, who died two hundred years ago, and
were buried here, and this is the ballad--
"'Bessie Bell and Mary Grey
They were twa bonnie lassies,
They biggit a hoose on yonder brae
And theikit it ower wi' rashes.'"
Then the General and Kate sat down by the river edge, and he told her
the deathless story,--how in the plague of 1666 they fled to this
district to escape infection; how a lover came to visit one of them and
brought death in his kiss; how they sickened and died; how they were
laid to rest beside the Tochty water; and generations have made their
pilgrimage to the place, so wonderful and beautiful is love. They
loved, and their memory is immortal.
Kate rested her chin on her hand and gazed at the running water, which
continued while men and women live and love and die.
"He ought not to have come; it was a cowardly, selfish act, but I
suppose," added the General, "he could not keep away."
"Be sure she thought none the less of him for his coming, and I think a
woman will count life itself a small sacrifice for love," and Kate went
over to the grave.
A thrush was singing as they turned to go, and nothing was said on the
way home till they came near the Lodge.
"Who can that be going in, Kate? He seems a padre."
"I do not know, unless it be our fellow traveller from Muirtown; but he
has been redressing himself, and is not improved.
"Father," and Kate stayed the General, as they crossed the threshold of
their home, "we have seen many beautiful things to-day, for which I
thank you; but the greatest was love."