THE LAIRD’S BURROW.
Annie Mair had a brother, a carpenter, who, following her to Scaurnose,
had there rented a small building next door to her cottage, and
made of it a workshop. It had a rude loft, one end of which was
loosely floored, while the remaining part showed the couples through
the bare joists, except where some planks of oak and mahogany, with
an old door, a boat’s rudder, and other things that might come
in handy, were laid across them in store. There also, during the
winter, hung the cumulus-clouds of Blue Peter’s herring-nets; for
his cottage, having a garret above, did not afford the customary
place for them in the roof.
When the cave proved to be no longer a secret from the laird’s
enemies, Phemy, knowing that her father’s garret could never afford
him a sufficing sense of security, turned the matter over in her
active little brain until pondering produced plans, and she betook
herself to her uncle, with whom she was a great favourite. Him she
found no difficulty in persuading to grant the hunted man a refuge
in the loft. In a few days he had put up a partition between the
part which was floored and that which was open, and so made for him
a little room, accessible from the shop by a ladder and a trap-door.
He had just taken down an old window-frame to glaze for it, when
the laird coming in and seeing what he was about, scrambled up
the ladder, and, a moment after, all but tumbled down again in his
eagerness to put a stop to it: the window was in the gable, looking
to the south, and he would not have it glazed.
In blessed compensation for much of the misery of his lot, the
laird was gifted with an inborn delicate delight in nature and her
ministrations such as few poets even possess; and this faculty was
supplemented with a physical hardiness which, in association with
his weakness and liability to certain appalling attacks, was truly
astonishing. Though a rough hand might cause him exquisite pain, he
could sleep soundly on the hardest floor; a hot room would induce
a fit, but he would lie under an open window in the sharpest night
without injury; a rude word would make him droop like a flower in
frost, but he might go all day wet to the skin without taking cold.
To all kinds of what are called hardships, he had readily become
inured, without which it would have been impossible for his love
of nature to receive such a full development. For hence he grew
capable of communion with her in all her moods, undisabled either
by the deadening effects of present, or the aversion consequent on
past suffering. All the range of earth’s shows, from the grandeurs
of sunrise or thunder-storm down to the soft unfolding of a daisy
or the babbling birth of a spring, was to him an open book. It
is true, the delight of these things was constantly mingled with,
not unfrequently broken, indeed, by the troublous question of his
origin; but it was only on occasions of jarring contact with his
fellows, that it was accompanied by such agonies as my story has
represented. Sometimes he would sit on a rock, murmuring the words
over and over, and dabbling his bare feet, small and delicately
formed, in the translucent green of a tide-abandoned pool. But
oftener in a soft dusky wind, he might have been heard uttering them
gently and coaxingly, as if he would wile from the evening zephyr
the secret of his birth--which surely mother Nature must know. The
confinement of such a man would have been in the highest degree
cruel, and must speedily have ended in death. Even Malcolm did
not know how absolute was the laird’s need, not simply of air and
freedom, but of all things accompanying the enjoyment of them.
There was nothing then of insanity in his preference of a windowless
bedroom;--it was that airs and odours, birds and sunlight--the
sound of flapping wing, of breaking wave, and quivering throat,
might be free to enter. Cool clean air he must breathe, or die; with
that, the partial confinement to which he was subjected was not
unendurable; besides, the welcome rain would then visit him sometimes,
alighting from the slant wing of the flying blast; while the sun
would pour in his rays full and mighty and generous, unsifted by
the presumptuous glass--green and gray and crowded with distorting
lines; and the sharp flap of pigeon’s wing would be mimic thunder
to the flash which leapt from its whiteness as it shot by.
He not only loved but understood all the creatures, divining by an
operation in which neither the sympathy nor the watchfulness was
the less perfect that both were but half-conscious, the emotions
and desires informing their inarticulate language. Many of them
seemed to know him in return--either recognizing his person,
and from experience deducing safety, or reading his countenance
sufficiently to perceive that his interest prognosticated no
injury. The maternal bird would keep her seat in her nursery, and
give back his gaze; the rabbit peeping from his burrow would not
even draw in his head at his approach; the rooks about Scaurnose
never took to their wings until he was within a yard or two of
them: the laird, in his half-acted utterance, indicated that they
took him for a scarecrow and _therefore_ were not afraid of him.
Even Mrs Catanach’s cur had never offered him a bite in return for
a caress. He could make a bird’s nest, of any sort common in the
neighbourhood, so as deceive the most cunning of the nest-harrying
youths of the parish.[7]
[7] See article _Martin Féreol_, in _St. Paul’s Magazine_ vol. iv.
generally.
Hardly was he an hour in his new abode ere the sparrows and robins
began to visit him. Even strange birds of passage flying in at his
hospitable window, would espy him unscared, and sometimes partake
of the food he had always at hand to offer them. He relied, indeed,
for the pleasures of social intercourse with the animal world, on
stray visits alone; he had no pets--dog nor cat nor bird; for
his wandering and danger-haunted life did not allow such companionship.
He insisted on occupying his new quarters at once. In vain Phemy
and her uncle showed reason against it. He did not want a bed; he
much preferred a heap of _spales_, that is, wood shavings. Indeed,
he would not have a bed; and whatever he did want he would get
for himself. Having by word and gesture made this much plain, he
suddenly darted up the ladder, threw down the trap-door, and, lo!
like a hermit-crab, he had taken possession. Wisely they left him
alone.
For a full fortnight he allowed neither to enter the little
chamber. As often as they called him, he answered cheerfully, but
never showed himself except when Phemy brought him food, which,
at his urgent request, was only once in the twenty-four hours--
after night-fall, the last thing before she went to bed; then he
would slide down the ladder, take what she had brought him, and hurry
up again. Phemy was perplexed, and at last a good deal distressed,
for he had always been glad of her company before.
At length, one day, hearing her voice in the shop, and having peeped
through a hole in the floor to see that no stranger was present,
he invited her to go up, and lifted the trap-door.
“Come, come,” he said hurriedly, when her head appeared and came
no farther.
He stood holding the trap-door, eager to close it again as soon as
she should step clear of it, and surprise was retarding her ascent.
Before hearing his mind, the carpenter had already made for him,
by way of bedstead, a simple frame of wood, crossed with laths in
the form of lattice-work: this the laird had taken and set up on
its side, opposite the window, about two feet from it, so that, with
abundant passage for air, it served as a screen. Fixing it firmly
to the floor, he had placed on the top of it a large pot of the
favourite cottage-plant there called _Humility_, and trained its long
pendent runners over it. On the floor between it and the window, he
had ranged a row of flower pots--one of them with an ivy-plant,
which also he had begun to train against the trellis; and already
the humility and the ivy had begun to intermingle.
At one side of the room, where the sloping roof met the floor, was
his bed of fresh pine-shavings, amongst which, their resinous
half-aromatic odour apparently not sweet enough to content him, he had
scattered a quantity of dried rose-leaves. A thick tartan plaid,
for sole covering, lay upon the heap.
“I wad hae likit hay better,” he said, pointing to this lair rather
than couch, “but it’s some ill to get, an’ the spales they’re at
han’, an’ they smell unco clean.”
At the opposite side of the room lay a corresponding heap,
differing not a little, however, in appearance and suggestion. As
far as visible form and material could make it one, it was a grave
--rather a short one, but abundantly long for the laird. It was
in reality a heap of mould, about a foot and a half high, covered
with the most delicate grass, and bespangled with daisies.
“Laird!” said Phemy, half reproachfully, as she stood gazing at
the marvel, “ye hae been oot at nicht!”
“Aye--a’ nicht whiles, whan naebody was aboot ’cep’ the win’”
--he pronounced the word with a long-drawn imitative sough--“an’
the cloods an’ the splash o’ the watter.”
Pining under the closer imprisonment in his garret, which the
discovery of his subterranean refuge had brought upon him, the
laird would often have made his escape at night but for the fear
of disturbing the Mairs; and now that there was no one to disturb,
the temptation to spend his nights in the open air was the more
irresistible that he had conceived the notion of enticing nature
herself into his very chamber. Abroad then he had gone, as soon
as the first midnight closed around his new dwelling, and in the
fields had with careful discrimination begun to collect the mould
for his mound, a handful here and a handful there. This took him
several nights, and when it was finished, he was yet more choice
in his selection of turf, taking it from the natural grass growing
along the roads and on the earthen dykes, or walls, the outer
sides of which feed the portionless cows of that country. Searching
for miles in the moonlight, he had, with eye and hand, chosen out
patches of this grass, the shortest and thickest he could find, and
with a pocket knife, often in pieces of only a few inches, removed
the best of it and carried it home, to be fitted on the heap, and
with every ministration and blandishment enticed to flourish. He
pressed it down with soft firm hands, and beshowered it with water
first warmed a little in his mouth; when the air was soft, he guided
the wind to blow upon it; and as the sun could not reach it where
it lay, he gathered a marvellous heap of all the bright sherds he
could find--of crockery and glass and mirror, so arranging them
in the window, that each threw its tiny reflex upon the turf.
With this last contrivance, Phemy was specially delighted; and the
laird, happy as a child in beholding her delight, threw himself in
an ecstasy on the mound and clasped it in his arms. I can hardly
doubt that he regarded it as representing his own grave, to which
in his happier moods he certainly looked forward as a place of
final and impregnable refuge.
As he lay thus, foreshadowing his burial, or rather his resurrection,
a young canary which had flown from one of the cottages, flitted in
with a golden shiver and flash, and alighted on his head. He took
it gently in his hand and committed it to Phemy to carry home, with
many injunctions against disclosing how it had been captured.
His lonely days were spent in sleep, in tending his plants, or in
contriving defences; but in all weathers he wandered out at midnight,
and roamed or rested among fields or rocks till the first signs of
the breaking day, when he hurried like a wild creature to his den.
Before long he had contrived an ingenious trap, or man-spider-web,
for the catching of any human insect that might seek entrance at his
window: the moment the invading body should reach a certain point,
a number of lines would drop about him, in making his way through
which he would straightway be caught by the barbs of countless
fish-hooks--the whole strong enough at least to detain him until
its inventor should have opened the trap-door and fled.