'And soon a score of fires, I ween,
From height, and hill, and cliff were seen;
. . . . . . .
Each after each they glanced to sight,
As stars arise upon the night,
They gleamed on many a dusky tarn,
Haunted by the lonely earn;
On many a cairn's grey pyramid,
Where urns of mighty chiefs lie hid.'
The Lay of the Last Minstrel.
The rain continued at intervals throughout the day, but as the afternoon
wore on the skies looked a trifle more hopeful. It would be 'saft,' no
doubt, climbing the Law, but the bonfire must be lighted. Would Pettybaw
be behind London? Would Pettybaw desert the Queen in her hour of need?
Not though the rain were bursting the well-heads on Cawda; not though
the swollen mountain burns drowned us to the knee! So off we started as
the short midsummer night descended.
We were to climb the Law, wait for the signal from Cawda's lonely
height, and then fire Pettybaw's torch of loyalty to the little lady
in black; not a blaze flaming out war and rumours of war, as was the
beacon-fire on the old grey battlements of Edinburgh Castle in the days
of yore, but a message of peace and good-will. Pausing at a hut on
the side of the great green mountain, we looked north toward Helva,
white-crested with a wreath of vapour. (You need not look on your map of
Scotland for Cawda and Helva, for you will not find them any more
than you will find Pettybaw and Inchcaldy.) One by one the tops of the
distant hills began to clear, and with the glass we could discern the
bonfire cairns up-built here and there for Scotland's evening sacrifice
of love and fealty. Cawda was still veiled, and Cawda was to give the
signal for all the smaller fires. Pettybaw's, I suppose, was counted
as a flash in the pan, but not one of the hundred patriots climbing the
mountain-side would have acknowledged it; to us the good name of the
kingdom of Fife and the glory of the British Empire depended on Pettybaw
fire. Some of us had misgivings, too,--misgivings founded upon Miss
Grieve's dismal prophecies. She had agreed to put nine lighted candles
in each of our cottage windows at ten o'clock, but had declined to
go out of her kitchen to see a procession, hear a band, or look at
a bonfire. She had had a fair sickenin' day, an amount of work too
wearifu' for one person by her lane. She hoped that the bonfire wasna
built o' Mrs. Sinkler's coals nor Mr. Macbrose's kindlings, nor soaked
with Mr. Cameron's paraffin; and she finished with the customary, but
irrelative and exasperating, allusion to the exceedingly nice family
with whom she had live in Glasgy.
And still we toiled upward, keeping our doubts to ourselves. Jean was
limping bravely, supported by Robin Anstruther's arm. Mr. Macdonald
was ardently helping Francesca, who can climb like a chamois, but would
doubtless rather be assisted. Her gypsy face shone radiant out of her
black cloth hood, and Ronald's was no less luminous. I have never seen
two beings more love-daft. They comport themselves as if they had
read the manuscript of the tender passion, and were moving in exalted
superiority through a less favoured world,--a world waiting impatiently
for the first number of the story to come out.
Still we climbed, and as we approached the Grey Lady (a curious rock
very near the summit) somebody proposed three cheers for the Queen.
How the children hurrahed,--for the infant heart is easily
inflamed,--and how their shrill Jubilee slogan pierced the mystery of
the night, and went rolling on from glen to glen to the Firth of Forth
itself! Then there was a shout from the rocketmen far out on the open
moor,--'Cawda's clear! Cawda's clear!' Back against a silver sky stood
the signal pile, and signal rockets flashed upward, to be answered from
all the surrounding hills.
Now to light our own fire. One of the village committee solemnly took
off his hat and poured on oil. The great moment had come. Brenda Macrae
approached the sacred pile, and, tremulous from the effect of much
contradictory advice, applied the torch. Silence, thou Grieve and
others, false prophets of disaster! Who now could say that Pettybaw
bonfire had been badly built, or that its fifteen tons of coal and
twenty cords of wood had been unphilosophically heaped together?
The flames rushed toward the sky with ruddy blaze, shining with weird
effect against the black fir-trees and the blacker night. Three cheers
more! God save the Queen! May she reign over us, happy and glorious! And
we cheered lustily, too, you may be sure! It was more for the woman
than the monarch; it was for the blameless life, not for the splendid
monarchy; but there was everything hearty, and nothing alien in our
tone, when we sang 'God save the Queen' with the rest of the Pettybaw
villagers.
The land darkened; the wind blew chill. Willie, Mr. Macdonald, and Mr.
Anstruther brought rugs, and found a sheltered nook for us where we
might still watch the scene. There we sat, looking at the plains below,
with all the village streets sparkling with light, with rockets shooting
into the air and falling to earth in golden rain, with red lights
flickering on the grey lakes, and with one beacon-fire after another
gleaming from the hilltops, till we could count more than fifty
answering one another from the wooded crests along the shore, some
of them piercing the rifts of low-lying clouds till they seemed to be
burning in mid-heaven.
Then one by one the distant fires faded, and as some of us still sat
there silently, far, far away in the grey east there was a faint flush
of carmine where the new dawn was kindling in secret. Underneath
that violet bank of cloud the sun was forging his beams of light. The
pole-star paled. The breath of the new morrow stole up out of the rosy
grey. The wings of the morning stirred and trembled; and in the darkness
and chill and mysterious awakening eyes looked into other eyes, hand
sought hand, and cheeks touched each other in mute caress.