Alexander Macaulay was his name; in the common conversation of the people
he was known as Alasdair Dhu, or Black Alick, for till he was nearly
seventy his hair was like the bramble-berry. Of his forebears in the
island everybody knew; they had owned Kincreggan for at least five
hundred years, until, in his grandfather’s time, they were proscribed and
rendered fugitive, made Children of the Mist, nameless vagabonds
frequenting desolate straths, making uneasy beds on hunted moors, their
home reft from them more by the quirk of the law than by valour, and the
walls of it grown with nettle and fern on the verge of the forest of
Kilree. Himself he had been brought up far apart from the scenes of his
cateran family, in a decent humdrum fashion in the Low County, where he
had studied the law, and whence he had come to his native isle a writer.
Silent, they said of him—silent and dour, except in congenial company,
when his laugh was as ready as any one’s, and his sense of a joke
singularly shrewd. Just a plain, douce, decent lawyer body, given
pedantically to the quotation of Latin maxims affecting his profession;
married, as I have said, to a Lowland wife; his business comfortable,
bringing him much about the Islands in boats and gigs. He was
“doer”—which is to say, man of business, or agent—for several of the most
notable families in the shire in his later years; but at the time I speak
of he was factor for Kilree alone.
When I have added that he was forty years of age when he had his odd
relapse, could sing a fine bass to the Psalmody on a Sabbath, was great
for books, and thought no hour of the day so happy as when he could get
into his slippers and his feet on the fender, and drink a dish of tea—a
beverage for which he had a passion many men have for wine—I have summed
up all that was apparent to his neighbours in the character of Alexander
Macaulay. And yet they left out a great part of the real Macaulay in
their estimate of the factor of Kilree.
It happened on a dirty wet day in the month of May that Kilree the
Captain himself was on the island, and came to Macaulay’s office to
consult regarding some improvements—as he esteemed them—that he had for
long contemplated on the inland side of his estate. He was in the Army,
a good and gallant soul, young and sentimental, with what is even now
common enough in the Highlands and Islands, a great regard for old
romantics.
“And I start at once to put the fence from Cairn Dearg to Carsaig,” said
he by-and-by, carelessly walking up and down Macaulay’s room, and looking
through the window at the sea-birds flying noisily along the shore.
The lawyer gave a little start in his armchair, and upset a bottle of red
ink. It was dripping from the desk to his knees, and he hurriedly swept
his hand across the stream of it, then dashed the flood with sand. “To
Carsaig, did you say?” he asked, taking up his penknife in his reddened
hand and nervously starting to shape a quill.
“Yes,” said the Captain, suspecting nothing. “Time’s slipping past, and
I’m determined to put off no longer carrying out my father’s old notion
of having the fence as far as the two rivers.”
“And what about Kincreggan?” asked the lawyer, suddenly grown the colour
of clay, but sitting still at his desk, his eyes on his reddened hand,
some strange freak of the fancy, as he used to say in after years,
filling his head with the salt scent of blood. Kincreggan, his people’s
home before they were broken, and tenants of the mist alone, was in a
little glen of Carsaig. In his mind in a moment he saw it perched above
its waters, empty and cold and grey, with only memory under its rotting
rafters.
“Oh, Kincreggan! Damn Kincreggan!” said the Captain, quite forgetting
that ever a Macaulay was bred there. “Kincreggan comes down, of course;
I’m going to put a shepherd’s cottage there.”
“What! you will pull down Kincreggan House,” cried the lawyer, jumping to
his feet so suddenly that his chair upset behind him. “Kincreggan!” he
repeated, with a kind of whimper; and the Captain turned sharply round at
the strangeness of the cry, and saw another man than his customary
factor—a fellow all thong in every sinew of his neck and face, his hair
tossed on his temples, his arms strained back, and a bloody hand
clenched, his whole body stiff as if he were about to spring. And his
eyes were wells of fire.
“Good God! what cat-a-mountain have I here in Alasdair Macaulay?” thought
the Captain, startled, and then remembered whose Kincreggan had been.
“Kincreggan!” said the lawyer again, and followed with a phrase of the
Gaelic language that he had never been known to speak since he left the
island, a child, for Edinburgh.
“Upon my word,” said the Captain, “but I clean forgot the old connection!
How was I to know my factor had the least objection? Come, come, Mr
Macaulay, we cannot permit a foolish old sentiment about a ruin of stones
to stand in the way of honest improvement. It is not as if Kincreggan
was a castle or a cathedral. I have my own repugnances about spoiling
old landmarks, but Kincreggan—! Come, come, Mr Macaulay, what scruple
need there be about a place like yon! Beyond yourself there is not a
single soul of the old breed left, and you never saw a fire in it—no, nor
your father before you!”
No miracle imaginable could have surprised him more than this—that a
plain man of the law in broadcloth in a carpeted office, with a pile of
black deed-boxes behind him, and the statutes of the land calf-bound on a
shelf at his elbow, a pen in his hand, and a fob-chain dangling below his
waistcoat, could have so remarkable a sentiment about an old ruin as
these dramatics of his seemed to suggest.
“Pooh! Mr Macaulay,” said he, “ye need not make any fracas about it now,
for Mackay has his orders, and starts at Kincreggan immediately; the roof
will be off in a day or two. And as for these silly clan sentiments, I
have lost money by them ere this: I will let them influence me no more; I
do not value them that, Mr Macaulay!” And so saying, he cracked his
fingers in his factor’s face.
Alasdair Dhu felt his blood boil in his head till his skull seemed like
to burst; the stain on his hand enlarged to a crimson cloud that filled
the chamber, as he used in later years to say himself, and a strange
roaring came into his ears. Suddenly he gave the cry of his clan, ran up
against Kilree, and with the penknife stabbed him in the bosom.
Without a pause so little as to look at the victim of his frenzy, he
passed quickly into his house, whereof his writing chamber was a part.
His wife sat sewing. He looked at her with an ecstasy in his eyes: “I’m
sick-tired of this,” cried he; “my grief! but I have been wasting time.”
And so saying, he turned on his heel and ran out to the garden behind the
house. Knowing nothing of the Captain’s state, she ran out after her
husband, and saw him leap the wall like a young roe. His clerk, a lad
Macdonald, was out in the garden for peats for the office fire. “Look at
your master!” she cried, and together they watched the lawyer throw off
his coat as he ran, and disappear at last in the fir planting on the
other side of the road, whence it rose on the face of the hill.
“What a caper!” she exclaimed. “Tut! tut!—he’s daft—clean daft! I
always thought there was a lot of his grandfather, Ranald, in him. And
such a day! He’ll get wet to the skin.”