THE CHIEF.
The Macruadh strode into the dark, and down the village, wasting no
time in picking his way--thence into the yet deeper dark of the
moorland hills. The rain was beginning to come down in earnest, but
he did not heed it; he was thoroughbred, and feared no element. An
umbrella was to him a ludicrous thing: how could a little rain--as
he would have called it had it come down in torrents--hurt any one!
The Macruadh, as the few who yet held by the sore-frayed,
fast-vanishing skirt of clanship, called him, was the son of the
last minister of the parish-a godly man, who lived that which he
could ill explain, and was immeasurably better than those parts of
his creed which, from a sense of duty, he pushed to the front. For
he held devoutly by the root of which he spoke too little, and it
supplied much sap to his life and teaching--out of the pulpit. He
was a genial, friendly, and by nature even merry man, always ready
to share what he had, and making no show of having what he had not,
either in wisdom, knowledge, or earthly goods. His father and
brother had been owners of the property and chiefs of the clan, much
beloved by the poor of it, and not a little misunderstood by most of
the more nourishing. For a great hunger after larger means, the
ambition of the mammon-ruled world, had arisen in the land, and with
it a rage for emigration. The uncle of the present Macruadh did all
he could to keep his people at home, lived on a couple of hundreds a
year himself, and let many of his farms to his gentlemen-tacksmen,
as they were called, at lower rents; but it was unavailing; one
after another departed, until his land lay in a measure waste, and
he grew very poor, mourning far more over his clan and his country
than his poverty. In more prosperous times he had scraped together a
little money, meaning it, if he could but avoid spending it in his
old age, for his brother, who must soon succeed him; for he was
himself a bachelor--the result of a romantic attachment and sorrow
in his youth; but he lent it to a company which failed, and so lost
it. At length he believed himself compelled, for the good of his
people, to part with all but a mere remnant of the property. From
the man to whom he sold it, Mr. Peregrine Palmer bought it for twice
the money, and had still a good bargain. But the hopes of the laird
were disappointed: in the sheep it fed, and the grouse it might be
brought to breed, lay all its value in the market; there was no
increase in the demand for labour; and more and more of the
peasantry emigrated, or were driven to other parts of the country.
Such was the present treatment of the land, causing human life to
ebb from it, and working directly counter to the creative God.
The laird retired to the humble cottage of his brother the pastor,
just married rather late in life--where every comfort love could
give waited for him; but the thought that he could have done better
for his people by retaining the land soon wore him out; and having
made a certain disposition of the purchase-money, he died.
What remained of the property came to the minister. As for the
chieftainship, that had almost died before the chief; but, reviving
by union with the reverence felt for the minister, it took
thereafter a higher form. When the minister died, the idea of it
transmitted to his son was of a peculiarly sacred character; while
in the eyes of the people, the authority of the chief and the
influence of the minister seemed to meet reborn in Alister
notwithstanding his youth. In himself he was much beloved, and in
love the blessed rule, blessed where understood, holds, that to him
that hath shall be given, he only who has being fit to receive. The
love the people bore to his father, both pastor and chief, crowned
head and heart of Alister. Scarce man or woman of the poor remnant
of the clan did not love the young Macruadh.
On his side was true response. With a renewed and renovating
conscience, and a vivid sense that all things had to be made new, he
possessed an old strong heart, clinging first to his father and
mother, and then to the shadow even of any good thing that had come
floating down the ages. Call it a dream, a wild ideal, a foolish
fancy--call it what you please, he was filled with the notion of
doing something in his own person and family, having the remnant of
the clan for the nucleus of his endeavour, to restore to a vital
reality, let it be of smallest extent, that most ancient of
governments, the patriarchal, which, all around, had rotted into the
feudal, in its turn rapidly disintegrating into the mere dust and
ashes of the kingdom of the dead, over which Mammon reigns supreme.
There may have been youthful presumption and some folly in the
notion, but it sprang neither from presumption nor folly, but from
simple humanity, and his sense of the responsibility he neither
could nor would avoid, as the person upon whom had devolved the
headship, however shadowy, of a house, ruinous indeed, but not yet
razed.
The castle on the ridge stood the symbol of the family condition. It
had, however, been a ruin much longer than any one alive could
remember. Alister's uncle had lived in a house on the spot where Mr.
Peregrine Palmer's now stood; the man who bought it had pulled it
down to build that which Mr. Palmer had since enlarged. It was but a
humble affair--a great cottage in stone, much in the style of that
in which the young chief now lived--only six times the size, with
the one feature indispensable to the notion of a chief's residence,
a large hall. Some would say it was but a huge kitchen; but it was
the sacred place of the house, in which served the angel of
hospitality. THERE was always plenty to eat and drink for any comer,
whether he had "claim" or not: the question of claim where was need,
was not thought of. When the old house had to make room for the new,
the staves of the last of its half-pipes of claret, one of which
used always to stand on tap amidst the peat-smoke, yielded its final
ministration to humanity by serving to cook a few meals for mason
and carpenter.
The property of Clanruadh, for it was regarded as clan-property
BECAUSE belonging to the chief, stretched in old time away out of
sight in all directions--nobody, in several, could tell exactly how
far, for the undrawn boundary lines lay in regions of mist and
cloud, in regions stony, rocky, desert, to which a red deer, not to
say a stray sheep, rarely ascended. At one time it took in a portion
at least of every hill to be seen from the spot where stood the
ruin. The chief had now but a small farm, consisting of some fair
soil on the slope of a hill, and some very good in the valley on
both sides of the burn; with a hill-pasture that was not worth
measuring in acres, for it abounded in rocks, and was prolific in
heather and ling, with patches of coarse grass here and there, and
some extent of good high-valley grass, to which the small black
cattle and black-faced sheep were driven in summer. Beyond
periodical burnings of the heather, this uplifted portion received
no attention save from the mist, the snow, the rain, the sun, and
the sweet air. A few grouse and black game bred on it, and many
mountain-hares, with martens, wild cats, and other VERMIN. But so
tender of life was the Macruadh that, though he did not spare these
last, he did not like killing even a fox or a hooded crow, and never
shot a bird for sport, or would let another shoot one, though the
poorest would now and then beg a bird or two from him, sure of
having their request. It seemed to him as if the creatures were
almost a part of his clan, of which also he had to take care against
a greedy world. But as the deer and the birds ranged where they
would, it was not much he could do for them--as little almost as for
the men and women that had gone over the sea, and were lost to their
country in Canada.
Regret, and not any murmur, stirred the mind of Alister Macruadh
when he thought of the change that had passed on all things around
him. He had been too well taught for grumbling--least of all at what
was plainly the will of the Supreme--inasmuch as, however man might
be to blame, the thing was there. Personal regrets he had none
beyond those of family feeling and transmitted SENTIMENT. He was
able to understand something of the signs of the times, and saw that
nothing could bring back the old way--saw that nothing comes
back--at least in the same form; saw that there had been much that
ought not to come back, and that, if patriarchal ways were ever to
return, they must rise out of, and be administered upon loftier
principles--must begin afresh, and be wrought out afresh from the
bosom of a new Abraham, capable of so bringing up his children that
a new development of the one natural system, of government should be
possible with and through them. Perhaps even now, in the new country
to which so many of his people were gone, some shadowy reappearance
of the old fashion might have begun to take shape on a higher level,
with loftier aims, and in circumstances holding out fewer
temptations to the evils of the past!
Alister could not, at his years, have generated such thoughts but
for the wisdom that had gone before him--first the large-minded
speculation of his father, who was capable even of discarding his
prejudices where he saw they might mislead him; and next, the
response of his mother to the same: she was the only one who
entirely understood her husband. Isobel Macruadh was a woman of real
thinking-power. Her sons being but boys when their father died, she
at once took the part of mediator between the mind of the father and
that of his sons; and besides guiding them on the same principles,
often told them things their father had said, and talked with them
of things they had heard him say.
One of the chief lessons he left them wrought well for the casting
out of all with which the feudal system had debased the patriarchal;
and the poverty shared with the clan had powerfully helped: it was
spoken against the growing talionic regard of human relations--that,
namely, the conditions of a bargain fulfilled on both sides, all is
fulfilled between the bargaining parties.
"In the possibility of any bargain," he had said, "are involved
eternal conditions: there is relationship--there is brotherhood.
Even to give with a denial of claim, to be kind under protest, is an
injury, is charity without the love, is salt without the saltness.
If we spent our lives in charity we should never overtake neglected
claims--claims neglected from the very beginning of the relations of
men. If a man say, 'I have not been unjust; I owed the man nothing;'
he sides with Death--says with the typical murderer, 'Am I my
brother's keeper?' builds the tombs of those his fathers slew."
In the bosom of young Alister Macruadh, the fatherly relation of the
strong to the weak survived the disappearance of most of the outward
signs of clan-kindred: the chieftainship was SUBLIMED in him. The
more the body of outer fact died, the stronger grew in him the
spirit of the relation. As some savage element of a race will
reappear in an individual of it after ages of civilization, so may
good old ways of thinking and feeling, modes long gone out of
fashion and practice, survive and revive modified by circumstance,
in an individual of a new age. Such a one will see the customs of
his ancestors glorified in the mists of the past; what is noble in
them will appeal to all that is best in his nature, spurring the
most generous of his impulses, and stirring up the conscience that
would be void of offence. When the operative force of such regards
has been fostered by the teaching of a revered parent; when the
influences he has left behind are nourished and tended, with
thorough belief and devoted care, by her who shared his authority in
life, and now bears alone the family sceptre, there can be no bound
set to their possible potency in a mind of high spiritual order. The
primary impulse became with Alister a large portion of his religion:
he was the shepherd of the much ravaged and dwindled Macruadh-fold;
it was his church, in which the love of the neighbour was
intensified in the love of the relation and dependent. To aid and
guard this his flock, was Alister's divine service. It was
associated with a great dislike of dogma, originating in the recoil
of the truth within him from much that was commonly held and taught
for true.
Call the thing enthusiasm or what you will, so you believe it there,
and genuine.
It was only towards the poor of a decayed clan he had opportunity of
exercising the cherished relation; almost all who were not poor had
emigrated before the lands were sold; and indeed it was only the
poor who set store by their unity with the old head. Not a few of
the clan, removed elsewhither, would have smiled degenerate, and
with scorn in their amusement, at the idea of Alister's clinging to
any supposed reality in the position he could claim. Among such
nevertheless were several who, having made money by trade, would
each have been glad enough to keep up old traditions, and been ready
even to revive older, had the headship fallen to him. But in the
hands of a man whom, from the top of their wealth, they regarded as
but a poor farmer, they forgot all about it--along with a few other
more important and older-world matters; for where Mammon gets in his
foot, he will soon be lord of the house, and turn not merely Rank,
his rival demon, out of doors, but God himself. Alister indeed lived
in a dream; he did not know how far the sea of hearts had ebbed,
leaving him alone on the mount of his vision; but he dreamed a dream
that was worth dreaming; comfort and help flowed from it to those
about him, nor did it fail to yield his own soul refreshment also.
All dreams are not false; some dreams are truer than the plainest
facts. Fact at best is but a garment of truth, which has ten
thousand changes of raiment woven in the same loom. Let the dreamer
only do the truth of his dream, and one day he will realize all that
was worth realizing in it--and a great deal more and better than it
contained. Alister had no far-reaching visions of anything to come
out of his; he had, like the true man he was, only the desire to
live up to his idea of what the people looked up to in him. The one
thing that troubled him was, that his uncle, whom he loved so
dearly, should have sold the land.
Doubtless there was pride mingled with his devotion, and pride is an
evil thing. Still it was a human and not a devilish pride. I would
not be misunderstood as defending pride, or even excusing it in any
shape; it is a thing that must be got rid of at all costs; but even
for evil we must speak the truth; and the pride of a good man, evil
as it is, and in him more evil than in an evil man, yet cannot be in
itself such a bad thing as the pride of a bad man. The good man
would at once recognize and reject the pride of a bad man. A pride
that loves cannot be so bad as a pride that hates. Yet if the good
man do not cast out his pride, it will sink him lower than the bad
man's, for it will degenerate into a worse pride than that of any
bad man. Each must bring its own divinely-ordained consequence.
There is one other point in the character of the Macruadh which I
must mention ere I pass on; in this region, and at this time, it was
a great peculiarity, one that yielded satisfaction to few of the
clan, and made him even despised in the strath: he hated whisky, and
all the drinking customs associated with it. In this he was not
original; he had not come to hate it from noting the degradation and
crime that attended it, or that as poverty grew, drunkenness grew,
men who had used it in moderation taking more and more as
circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he
had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman
doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself
greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous
not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had
banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from
their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness
and its physical means into the minds of her sons. In her childhood
she had seen its evils in her own father: by no means a drunkard, he
was the less of a father because he did as others did. Never an
evening passed without his drinking his stated portion of
whisky-toddy, growing more and more subject to attacks of had
temper, with consequent injustice and unkindness. The recollection
may have made her too sweeping in her condemnation of the habit, but
I doubt it; and anyhow a habit is not a man, and we need not much
condemn that kind of injustice. We need not be tender over a habit
which, though not all bad, yet leads to endless results that are all
bad. I would follow such to its grave without many tears!
Isobel Macruadh was one of those rare women who preserve in years
the influence gained in youth; and the thing that lay at the root of
the fact was her justice. For though her highland temper would
occasionally burst out in hot flame, everyone knew that if she were
in the wrong, she would see it and say it before any one else would
tell her of it. This justice it was, ready against herself as for
another, that fixed the influence which her goodness and her
teaching of righteousness gained.
Her eldest child, a girl, died in infancy. Alister and Ian were her
whole earthly family, and they worshipped her.