“Hamish will just be putting the mare in the cart to drive over the
ladies, so the need is not so great for hurrying.”
The arrangement of the crofter’s wife is hospitably meant, if somewhat
ominously expressed. Conveyance of any kind, moreover, will be most
acceptable to the two ladies of our party after their long ramble
on seashore and moorland; and the more primitive it prove, the more
fittingly will it end the memories of the day. “Meanwhile ‘the need
is not so great for hurrying,’” repeats one of the two slyly, out of
hearing of her hostess, and, pulling off her gloves, proceeds to gather
pleasure from the blazing chimneyful of peat. Leaning back in the
warm light, she stirs the white feathery ash with a dainty boot, and
discovers, to the boot’s cost and her own surprise, that the whiteness
of the peat conceals a glow of burning red. It is a peculiarity of the
Highland character, as of the Highland fuel, this fire within the grey
exterior, needing only a touch or a breath to show itself.
The light ash of the peat, they say, flies everywhere about a shieling.
But it is a cleanly thing. It leaves no tarnish, at anyrate, on
the snowy wood dresser or its high rack of shining delf. The tall
old-fashioned mahogany case-clock in the corner, an heirloom much
valued, may have absorbed more of the powder, perhaps, than conduces
to regular intestinal working; but the open iron cruizie or cresset
lamp hanging quaintly, though now unused, from the high mantelshelf, is
kept clear enough for lighting yet if need were; and maybe the hams and
“kippered” fish hanging from hooks in the blackened rafters are rather
improved in flavour by the condiment.
But look here. With true Highland hospitality, preparations for tea
have been surreptitiously advanced, and the fresh, wholesome-looking
daughter of the house and her mother lift into the middle of the
earthen floor the table ready caparisoned with cloth-of-snow,
glittering cups and knives, heaped sugar-bowl, and beaker of rich
yellow cream. A lissome flower of the moors is this crofter maid. The
oatmeal which she has been baking is not more soft and fair than
the skin of the comely lass, and, as she smiles reply in lifting the
toasted oat-farles from the flat iron “girdle” swung over the fire, it
needs no poet to notice that her eyes are bits of summer sea and her
mouth a damask bud. The toasted farles of oat-cake from her hand send
forth an ambrosial smell which, with the fragrance of the new-made tea,
is irresistible to hungry folk, and no pressing Highland exhortation is
needed to set visitors of both sexes to the attack of the viands.
Not till every one has again and again declared sheer inability to
pursue the attack further, does the announcement come that “the mare
is in the cart.” A chair, therefore, is presently carried out, and
the whole party of four mount into the rough vehicle among the straw.
Hereupon follow a hand-shaking and repetition of hospitable invitations
to return which begin to become almost embarrassing, before Hamish
starts at his horse’s head upon the moor track.
A long, memorable day it has been, amid the warm sunshine and the
bright sea-breeze, a day to do the heart good and to tire the limbs
royally--the morning draught of brave mountain air and life on the
white moorland road before the inn; the forenoon ramble, rod in hand,
on the warm gorse-path by the river; luncheon in quaint-flavoured,
wit-haunted company by the blue Kilbrannan Sound, with nothing to
interrupt but the beat of sudden outflying wings sometimes about
the warm cliff crannies overhead, and, on the beach below, the soft
caressing murmur of the secret-telling sea; the afternoon drive to the
far hill-clachan, where the turf roofs were tied down with heather
ropes, where the brown women were carrying sea-wrack to manure their
fields, and where, as a back-sound to the quaint-turned Highland
speech, was heard the thud-thud of the swinging flails; and, last of
all, the return at evening by the high moorland path, with the amethyst
fire dying out on Ben Ghoil in the east, and, in the west, the sunset
heavens aflame with saffron and rose, and the sea a living splendour of
generous wine.
Now it is night, and the air comes cooler over the moor. No air is like
Arran air at night, with its vague herb-perfumes adrift, for stirring
old memories and desires in the heart and new ambitions in the blood.
Upon its clear breath old designs, old possibilities long forgotten,
come back again to make life and hope. By it the vapours of worldly
wisdom are blown aside, the cloud-wrack care of intervening years is
lifted, and one walks again clear-hearted for a time in the April
valley of his youth. Night anywhere has charms for those who think, but
night upon the moors possesses an influence peculiarly its own. The
primeval heath, wild and undesecrated by the hand of man, lies under
“the splendid-mooned and jewelled night,” shadowy and mystic with the
silence of the ages. Abroad upon the moor at such an hour seem to brood
the imaginings of an older world, and the grey stone circles standing
gaunt yet upon the Arran wilds are hardly needed to suggest the memory
that along these wilds, once upon a time, wound processions of bearded
Druids, to practise under the starry influences rites of a faith now
long forgotten. At intervals upon the moor appear these grey menhirs
and circles. Inscrutable as the Egyptian sphinx they stand with sealed
lips, strange monuments of a buried past. For tens of centuries they
have seen the dusks gather and the stars swim overhead, but no rising
sun has wakened them from their silence, and still they keep the stony
secret of their origin, though they could not keep the ashes of the
dead committed to their charge.
Meanwhile Hamish makes way steadily, though by tortuous windings.
None but a native bred on the spot could conduct a vehicle safely by
night across these moors. Where unaccustomed eyes can make out no sign
whatever of a track, and where a single mistake would send one wheel
floundering into a peat-hag and the other spinning in the air, or
capsize the whole equipage into the miry abysses of a bog, Hamish leads
confidently on, with no worse result than the jolting of a rugged road.
The mare is a sturdy beast of the small sure-footed Arran breed, now
dying out, and she pulls away gallantly among rocks and heath-tufts
that would bring any other sort of horse to quick disaster. It takes
her master all his time to keep up with her on the rough ground, and
he has breath left for no more than an occasional “Ay, ay,” or “’Deed,
yes, sir!” in the true Arran accent. English is evidently the less
familiar language to him; his remarks to the mare, _sotto voce_, are in
Gaelic.
All last month after nightfall tufts and sheets of flame were to be
seen among the darkness of the hills; for in March they burn the
heather on the sheep-farms to let the young herbage come up, and the
conflagrations which appear then as pillars of smoke by day become
pillars of fire by night. But in April the moorland birds have begun to
build their nests, and the hills are left to them in darkness and in
peace. The only light to be seen from the cart is that in the window
of the croft far behind, which will be kept aglow by thoughtful hands
as a guide till Hamish’s return after moonset. Over the brow of the
moor, however, the shining lights of the clachan at the mountain foot
before long come into sight, and away to the right, tremulous with
silver and shadows, the sheen of the moonlight can be made out on the
sea. Rapidly now the path descends, plunging presently through lanes of
high thorn hedges where the stars are all but shut out overhead. The
rush of a river is heard, the wheels grate harshly on the gravel, there
is a sudden and vigorous splashing of hoofs, and the mare has passed
the ford. Then a half-mile of climb uphill on a good road, and Hamish
stands still with his charge at the door of the inn.