[Illustration: “COSMO CONDUCTED HER TO THE STABLE”]
WARLOCK O’GLENWARLOCK
A HOMELY ROMANCE
BY
GEORGE MACDONALD
AUTHOR OF “ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD,” “A SEABOARD PARISH,”
ETC.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER.
1. Castle Warlock
2. The Kitchen
3. The Drawing-room
4. An Afternoon Sleep
5. The School
6. Grannie’s Cottage
7. Dreams
8. Home
9. The Student
10. Peter Simon
11. The new Schooling
12. Grannie’s Ghost Story
13. The Storm-Guest
14. The Castle Inn
15. That Night
16. Through the Day
17. That same Night
18. A Winter Idyl
19. An “Interlunar Cave”
20. Catch yer Naig
21. The Watchmaker
22. That Luminous Night
23. At College
24. A Tutorship
25. The Gardener
26. Lost and Found
27. A Transformation
28. The Story of the Knight who spoke the Truth
29. New Experience
30. Charles Jermyn, M. D.
31. Cosmo and the Doctor
32. The Naiad
33. The Garden-House
34. Catch your Horse
35. Pull his Tail
36. The thick Darkness
37. The Dawn
38. The Shadow of Death
39. The Labourer
40. The Schoolmaster
41 Grannie and the Stick
42. Obstruction
43. Grizzie’s Rights
44. Another Harvest
45. The final Conflict
46. A Rest
47. Help
48. A common Miracle
49. Defiance
50. Discovery and Confession
51. It is Naught saith the Buyer
52. An old Story
53. A small Discovery
54. A greater Discovery
55. A great Discovery
56. Mr. Burns
57. Too Sure comes too late
58. A little Life well rounded
59. A Breaking Up
60. Repose
61. The third Harvest
62. A duet, Trio, and Quartette
Transcriber’s Note
In the original text, there are two chapters numbered 37 (XXXVII) - “The
Dawn” and “Home Again”. The latter was left out of the table of contents
and that has been replicated here.
CHAPTER I.
CASTLE WARLOCK.
A rough, wild glen it was, to which, far back in times unknown to
its annals, the family had given its name, taking in return no
small portion of its history, and a good deal of the character of
its individuals. It lay in the debatable land between highlands and
lowlands; most of its inhabitants spoke both Scotch and Gaelic; and
there was often to be found in them a notable mingling of the chief
characteristics of the widely differing Celt and Teuton. The
country produced more barley than wheat, more oats than barley,
more heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow
than anything. It was a solitary, thinly peopled region, mostly of
bare hills, and partially cultivated glens, each with its small
stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a
mountain ash, or an alder tree, but with nothing capable of giving
much shade or shelter, save cliffy banks and big stones. From many
a spot you might look in all directions and not see a sign of human
or any other habitation. Even then however, you might, to be sure,
most likely smell the perfume--to some nostrils it is nothing less
than perfume--of a peat fire, although you might be long in finding
out whence it came; for the houses, if indeed the dwellings could
be called houses, were often so hard to be distinguished from the
ground on which they were built, that except the smoke of fresh
peats were coming pretty freely from the wide-mouthed chimney, it
required an experienced eye to discover the human nest. The valleys
that opened northward produced little; there the snow might some
years be seen lying on patches of oats yet green, destined now only
for fodder; but where the valley ran east and west, and any
tolerable ground looked to the south, there things put on a
different aspect. There the graceful oats would wave and rustle in
the ripening wind, and in the small gardens would lurk a few
cherished strawberries, while potatoes and peas would be tolerably
plentiful in their season.
Upon a natural terrace in such a slope to the south, stood Castle
Warlock. But it turned no smiling face to the region whence came
the warmth and the growth. A more grim, repellant, unlovely
building would be hard to find; and yet, from its extreme
simplicity, its utter indifference to its own looks, its repose,
its weight, and its gray historical consciousness, no one who loved
houses would have thought of calling it ugly. It was like the
hard-featured face of a Scotch matron, suggesting no end of story,
of life, of character: she holds a defensive if not defiant face to
the world, but within she is warm, tending carefully the fires of
life. Summer and winter the chimneys of that desolate-looking house
smoked; for though the country was inclement, and the people that
lived in it were poor, the great, sullen, almost unhappy-looking
hills held clasped to their bare cold bosoms, exposed to all the
bitterness of freezing winds and summer hail, the warmth of
household centuries: their peat-bogs were the store-closets and
wine-cellars of the sun, for the hoarded elixir of physical life.
And although the walls of the castle, as it was called, were so
thick that in winter they kept the warmth generated within them
from wandering out and being lost on the awful wastes of homeless
hillside and moor, they also prevented the brief summer heat of the
wayfaring sun from entering with freedom, and hence the fires were
needful in the summer days as well--at least at the time my story
commences, for then, as generally, there were elderly and aged
people in the house, who had to help their souls to keep their
bodies warm.
The house was very old. It had been built for more kinds of shelter
than need to be thought of in our days. For the enemies of our
ancestors were not only the cold, and the fierce wind, and the
rain, and the snow; they were men also--enemies harder to keep out
than the raging storm or the creeping frost. Hence the more
hospitable a house could be, the less must it look what it was: it
must wear its face haughty, and turn its smiles inward. The house
of Glenwarlock, as it was also sometimes called, consisted of three
massive, narrow, tall blocks of building, which showed little
connection with each other beyond juxtaposition, two of them
standing end to end, with but a few feet of space between, and the
third at right angles to the two. In the two which stood end to
end, and were originally the principal parts, hardly any windows
were to be seen on the side that looked out into the valley; while
in the third, which, though looking much of the same age, was of
later build, were more windows, but none in the lowest story.
Narrow as were these buildings, and four stories high, they had a
solid, ponderous look, suggesting a thickness of the walls such as
to leave little of a hollow within for the indwellers--like great
marine shells for a small mollusk. On the other side was a kind of
a court, completed by the stables and cowhouses, and towards this
court were most of the windows--many of them for size more like
those in the cottages around, than suggestive of a house built by
the lords of the soil. The court was now merely that of a farmyard.
There must have been at one time outer defences to the castle, but
they were no longer to be distinguished by the inexperienced eye;
and indeed the windowless walls of the house itself seemed strong
enough to repel any attack without artillery--except indeed the
assailants had got into the court. There were however some signs of
the windows there having been enlarged if not increased at a later
period.
In the block that stood angle-wise to the rest, was the kitchen,
the door of which opened immediately on the court; and behind the
kitchen, in that part which had no windows to the valley, was the
milk-cellar, as they called the dairy, and places for household
storage. A rough causeway ran along the foot of the walls,
connecting the doors in the different blocks. Of these, the kitchen
door for the most part stood open: sometimes the snow would be
coming fast down the wide chimney, with little soft hisses in the
fire, and the business of the house going on without a thought of
closing it, though from it you could not have seen across the yard
for the falling flakes.
But when my story opens, the summer held the old house and the
older hills in its embrace. The sun was pouring torrents of light
and heat into the valley, and the slopes of it were covered with
green. The bees were about, contenting themselves with the flowers,
while the heather was getting ready its bloom for them, and a boy
of fourteen was sitting in a little garden that lay like a dropped
belt of beauty about the feet of the grim old walls. This was on
the other side--that to the south, parting the house from the slope
where the corn began--now with the ear half-formed. The boy sat on
a big stone, which once must have had some part in the house
itself, or its defences, but which he had never known except as a
seat for himself. His back leaned against the hoary wall, and he
was in truth meditating, although he did not look as if he were. He
was already more than an incipient philosopher, though he could not
yet have put into recognizable shape the thought that was now
passing through his mind. The bees were the primary but not the
main subject of it. It came thus: he thought how glad the bees
would be when their crop of heather was ripe; then he thought how
they preferred the heather to the flowers; then, that the one must
taste nicer to them than the other; and last awoke the question
whether their taste of sweet was the same as his. “For,” said he,
“if their honey is sweet to them with the same sweetness with which
it is sweet to me, then there is something in the make of the bee
that’s the same with the make of me; and perhaps then a man might
some day, if he wanted, try the taste of being a bee all out for a
little while.” But to see him, nobody would have thought he was
doing anything but basking in the sun. The scents of the flowers
all about his feet came and went on the eddies of the air, paying
my lord many a visit in his antechamber, his brain; the windy
noises of the insects, the watery noises of the pigeons, the noises
from the poultry yard, the song of the mountain river, visited him
also through the portals of his ears; but at the moment, the boy
seemed lost in the mere fundamental satisfaction of existence.
Neither, although broad summer was on the earth, and all the
hill-tops, and as much of the valleys as their shadows did not
hide, were bathed in sunlight, although the country was his native
land, and he loved it with the love of his country’s poets, was the
consciousness of the boy free from a certain strange kind of
trouble connected with, if not resulting from the landscape before
him. A Celt through many of his ancestors, and his mother in
particular, his soul, full of undefined emotion, was aware of an
ever recurring impulse to song, ever checked and broken, ever
thrown back upon itself. There were a few books in the house,
amongst them certain volumes of verse--a copy of Cowly, whose
notable invocation of Light he had instinctively blundered upon;
one of Milton; the translated Ossian; Thomson’s Seasons--with a few
more; and from the reading of these, among other results, had
arisen this--that, in the midst of his enjoyment of the world
around him, he found himself every now and then sighing after a
lovelier nature than that before his eyes. There he read of
mountains, if not wilder, yet loftier and more savage than his own,
of skies more glorious, of forests of such trees as he knew only
from one or two old engravings in the house, on which he looked
with a strange, inexplicable reverence: he would sometimes wake
weeping from a dream of mountains, or of tossing waters. Once with
his waking eyes he saw a mist afar off, between the hills that
ramparted the horizon, grow rosy after the sun was down, and his
heart filled as with the joy of a new discovery. Around him, it is
true, the waters rushed well from their hills, but their banks had
little beauty. Not merely did the want of trees distress him, but
the nature of their channel; most of them, instead of rushing
through rocks, cut their way only through beds of rough gravel, and
their bare surroundings were desolate without grandeur--almost mean
to eyes that had not yet pierced to the soul of them. Nor had he
yet learned to admire the lucent brown of the bog waters. There
seemed to be in the boy a strain of some race used to a richer
home; and yet all the time the frozen regions of the north drew his
fancy tenfold more than Italy or Egypt.
His name was Cosmo, a name brought from Italy by one of the line
who had sold his sword and fought for strangers. Not a few of the
younger branches of the family had followed the same evil
profession, and taken foreign pay--chiefly from poverty and
prejudice combined, but not a little in some cases from the inborn
love of fighting that seems to characterize the Celt. The last
soldier of them had served the East India Company both by sea and
land: tradition more than hinted that he had chiefly served
himself. Since then the heads of the house had been peaceful
farmers of their own land, contriving to draw what to many farmers
nowadays would seem but a scanty subsistence from an estate which
had dwindled to the twentieth part of what it had been a few
centuries before, though even then it could never have made its
proprietor rich in anything but the devotion of his retainers.
Growing too hot between the sun and the wall, Cosmo rose, and
passing to the other side of the house beyond the court-yard, and
crossing a certain heave of grass, came upon one unfailing delight
in his lot--a preacher whose voice, inarticulate, it is true, had,
ever since he was born, been at most times louder in his ear than
any other. It was a mountain stream, which, through a channel of
rock, such as nearly satisfied his most fastidious fancy, went
roaring, rushing, and sometimes thundering, with an arrow-like,
foamy swiftness, down to the river in the glen below. The rocks
were very dark, and the foam stood out brilliant against them. From
the hill-top above, it came, sloping steep from far. When you
looked up, it seemed to come flowing from the horizon itself, and
when you looked down, it seemed to have suddenly found it could no
more return to the upper regions it had left too high behind it,
and in disgust to shoot headlong to the abyss. There was not much
water in it now, but plenty to make a joyous white rush through the
deep-worn brown of the rock: in the autumn and spring it came down
gloriously, dark and fierce, as if it sought the very centre, wild
with greed after an absolute rest.
The boy stood and gazed, as was his custom. Always he would seek
this endless water when he grew weary, when the things about him
put on their too ordinary look. Let the aspect of this be what it
might, it seemed still inspired and sent forth by some essence of
mystery and endless possibility. There was in him an unusual
combination of the power to read the hieroglyphic internal aspect
of things, and the scientific nature that bows before fact. He knew
that the stream was in its second stage when it rose from the earth
and rushed past the house, that it was gathered first from the
great ocean, through millions of smallest ducts, up to the
reservoirs of the sky, thence to descend in snows and rains, and
wander down and up through the veins of the earth; but the sense of
its mystery had not hitherto begun to withdraw. Happily for him,
the poetic nature was not merely predominant in him, but dominant,
sending itself, a pervading spirit, through the science that else
would have stifled him. Accepting fact, he found nothing in its
outward relations by which a man can live, any more than by bread;
but this poetic nature, illuminating it as with the polarized ray,
revealed therein more life and richer hope. All this was as yet
however as indefinite as it was operative in him, and I am telling
of him what he could not have told of himself.
He stood gazing now in a different mood from any that had come to
him before: he had begun to find out something fresh about this
same stream, and the life in his own heart to which it served as a
revealing phantasm. He recognized that what in the stream had drawn
him from earliest childhood, with an infinite pleasure, was the
vague sense, for a long time an ever growing one, of its
_mystery_--the form the infinite first takes to the simplest and
liveliest hearts. It was because it was _always_ flowing that he
loved it, because it could not stop: whence it came was utterly
unknown to him, and he did not care to know. And when at length he
learned that it came flowing out of the dark hard earth, the
mystery only grew. He imagined a wondrous cavity below in black
rock, where it gathered and gathered, nobody could think how--not
coming from anywhere else, but beginning just there, and nowhere
beyond. When, later on, he had to shift its source, and carry it
back to the great sky, it was no less marvellous, and more lovely;
it was a closer binding together of the gentle earth and the awful
withdrawing heavens. These were a region of endless hopes, and ever
recurrent despairs: that his beloved, an earthly finite thing,
should rise there, was added joy, and gave a mighty hope with
respect to the unknown and appalling. But from the sky, he was sent
back to the earth in further pursuit; for, whence came the rain,
his books told him, but from the sea? That sea he had read of,
though never yet beheld, and he knew it was magnificent in its
might; gladly would he have hailed it as an intermediate betwixt
the sky and the earth--so to have the sky come first! but, alas!
the ocean came first in order. And then, worse and worse! how was
the ocean fed but from his loved torrent? How was the sky fed but
from the sea? How was the dark fountain fed but from the sky? How
was the torrent fed but from the fountain? As he sat in the hot
garden, with his back against the old gray wall, the nest of his
family for countless generations, with the scent of the flowers in
his nostrils, and the sound of the bees in his ears, it had begun
to dawn upon him that he had lost the stream of his childhood, the
mysterious, infinite idea of endless, inexplicable, original birth,
of outflowing because of essential existence within! There was no
production any more, nothing but a mere rushing around, like the
ring-sea of Saturn, in a never ending circle of formal change! Like
a great dish, the mighty ocean was skimmed in particles invisible,
which were gathered aloft into sponges all water and no sponge; and
from this, through many an airy, many an earthy channel, deflowered
of its mystery, his ancient, self-producing fountain to a holy
merry river, was _fed_--only _fed_! He grew very sad, and well he
might. Moved by the spring eternal in himself, of which the love in
his heart was but a river-shape, he turned away from the deathened
stream, and without knowing why, sought the human elements about
the place.