E-text prepared by Audrey Longhurst, Diane Monico, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
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Books by
Mary Johnston
Foes
Sir Mortimer
Harper & Brothers, New York
[Established 1817]
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FOES
A Novel
by
MARY JOHNSTON
Author of
"To Have and to Hold" "Audrey" "Lewis Rand"
"Sir Mortimer" "The Long Roll"
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
1918
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
Said Mother Binning: "Whiles I spin and whiles I dream. A bonny day
like this I look."
English Strickland, tutor at Glenfernie House, looked, too, at the
feathery glen, vivid in June sunshine. The ash-tree before Mother
Binning's cot overhung a pool of the little river. Below, the water
brawled and leaped from ledge to ledge, but here at the head of the
glen it ran smooth and still. A rose-bush grew by the door and a hen
and her chicks crossed in the sun. English Strickland, who had been
fishing, sat on the door-stone and talked to Mother Binning, sitting
within with her wheel beside her.
"What is it, Mother, to have the second sight?"
"It's to see behind the here and now. Why're ye asking?"
"I wish I could buy it or slave for it!" said Strickland. "Over and
over again I really need to see behind the here and now!"
"Aye. It's needed mair really than folk think. It's no' to be had by
buying nor slaving. How are the laird and the leddy?"
"Why, well. Tell me," said Strickland, "some of the things you've
seen with second sight."
"It taks inner ears for inner things."
"How do you know I haven't them?"
"Maybe 'tis so. Ye're liked well enough."
Mother Binning looked at the dappling water and the June trees and the
bright blue sky. It was a day to loosen tongue.
"I'll tell you ane thing I saw. It's mair than twenty years since
James Stewart, that was son of him who fled, wad get Scotland and
England again intil his hand. So the laddie came frae overseas, and
made stir and trouble enough, I tell ye!... Now I'll show you what I
saw, I that was a young woman then, and washing my wean's claes in the
water there. The month was September, and the year seventeen fifteen.
Mind you, nane hereabouts knew yet of thae goings-on!... I sat back on
my heels, with Jock's sark in my hand, and a lav'rock was singing, and
whiles I listened the pool grew still. And first it was blue glass
under blue sky, and I sat caught. And then it was curled cloud or
milk, and then it was nae color at all. And then I _saw_, and 'twas as
though what I saw was around me. There was a town nane like
Glenfernie, and a country of mountains, and a water no' like this one.
There pressed a thrang of folk, and they were Hieland men and Lowland
men, but mair Hieland than Lowland, and there were chiefs and
chieftains and Lowland lords, and there were pipers. I heard naught,
but it was as though bright shadows were around me. There was a height
like a Good People's mount, and a braw fine-clad lord speaking and
reading frae a paper, and by him a surpliced man to gie a prayer, and
there was a banner pole, and it went up high, and it had a gowd ball
atop. The braw lord stopped speaking, and all the Hielandmen and
Lowlandmen drew and held up and brandished their claymores and swords.
The flash ran around like the levin. I kenned that they shouted, all
thae gay shadows! I saw the pipers' cheeks fill with wind, and the
bags of the pipes fill. Then ane drew on a fine silken rope, and up
the pole there went a braw silken banner, and it sailed out in the
wind. And there was mair shouting and brandishing. But what think ye
might next befall? That gowden ball, gowden like the sun before it
drops, that topped the pole, it fell! I marked it fall, and the heads
dodge, and it rolled upon the ground.... And then all went out like a
candle that you blaw upon. I was kneeling by the water, and Jock's
sark in my hand, and the lav'rock singing, and that was all."
"I have heard tell of that," said Strickland. "It was near Braemar."
"And that's mony a lang league frae here! Sax days, and we had news of
the rising, with the gathering at Braemar. And said he wha told us,
'The gilt ball fell frae the standard pole, and there's nane to think
that a good omen!' But I _saw_ it," said Mother Binning. She turned
her wheel, a woman not yet old and with a large, tranquil comeliness.
"What I see makes fine company!"
Strickland plucked a rose and smelled it. "This country is fuller of
such things than is England that I come from."
"Aye. It's a grand country." She continued to spin. The tutor looked
at the sun. It was time to be going if he wished another hour with the
stream. He took up his rod and book and rose from the door-step.
Mother Binning glanced aside from her wheel.
"How gaes things with the lad at the House?"
"Alexander or James?"
"The one ye call Alexander."
"That is his name."
"I think that he's had ithers. That's a lad of mony lives!"
Strickland, halting by the rose-bush, looked at Mother Binning. "I
suppose we call it 'wisdom' when two feel alike. Now that's just what
I feel about Alexander Jardine! It's just feeling without
rationality."
"Eh?"
"There isn't any reason in it."
"I dinna know about 'reason.' There's _being_ in it."
The tutor made as if to speak further, then, with a shake of his head,
thought better of it. Thirty-five years old, he had been a tutor since
he was twenty, dwelling, in all, in four or five more or less
considerable houses and families. Experience, adding itself to innate
good sense, had made him slow to discuss idiosyncrasies of patrons or
pupils. Strong perplexity or strong feeling might sometimes drive him,
but ordinarily he kept a rein on speech. Now he looked around him.
"What high summer, lovely weather!"
"Oh aye! It's bonny. Will ye be gaeing, since ye have na mair to say?"
English Strickland laughed and said good-by to Mother Binning and
went. The ash-tree, the hazels that fringed the water, a point of
mossy rock, hid the cot. The drone of the wheel no longer reached his
ears. It was as though all that had sunk into the earth. Here was only
the deep, the green, and lonely glen. He found a pool that invited,
cast, and awaited the speckled victim. In the morning he had had fair
luck, but now nothing.... The water showed no more diamonds, the lower
slopes of the converging hills grew a deep and slumbrous green. Above
was the gold, shoulder and crest powdered with it, unearthly,
uplifted. Strickland ceased his fishing. The light moved slowly
upward; the trees, the crag-heads, melted into heaven; while the lower
glen lay in lengths of shadow, in jade and amethyst. A whispering
breeze sprang up, cool as the water sliding by. Strickland put up his
fisherman's gear and moved homeward, down the stream.
He had a very considerable way to go. The glen path, narrow and rough,
went up and down, still following the water. Hazel and birch, oak and
pine, overhung and darkened it. Bosses of rock thrust themselves
forward, patched with lichen and moss, seamed and fringed with fern
and heath. Roots of trees, huge and twisted, spread and clutched like
guardian serpents. In places where rock had fallen the earth seemed to
gape. In the shadow it looked a gnome world--a gnome or a dragon
world. Then upon ledge or bank showed bells or disks or petaled suns
of June flowers, rose and golden, white and azure, while overhead was
heard the evening song of birds alike calm and merry, and through a
cleft in the hills poured the ruddy, comfortable sun.
The walls declined in height, sloped farther back. The path grew
broader; the water no longer fell roaring, but ran sedately between
pebbled beaches. The scene grew wider, the mouth of the glen was
reached. He came out into a sunset world of dale and moor and
mountain-heads afar. There were fields of grain, and blue waving
feathers from chimneys of cottage and farm-house. In the distance
showed a village, one street climbing a hill, and atop a church with a
spire piercing the clear east. The stream widened, flowing thin over a
pebbly bed. The sun was not yet down. It painted a glory in the west
and set lanes and streets of gold over the hills and made the little
river like Pactolus. Strickland approached a farm-house, prosperous
and venerable, mended and neat. Thatched, long, white, and low, behind
it barns and outbuildings, it stood tree-guarded, amid fields of young
corn. Beyond it swelled a long moorside; in front slipped the still
stream.
There were stepping-stones across the stream. Two young girls, coming
toward the house, had set foot upon these. Strickland, halting in the
shadow of hazels and young aspens, watched them as they crossed. Their
step was free and light; they came with a kind of hardy grace,
elastic, poised, and very young, homeward from some visit on this
holiday. The tutor knew them to be Elspeth and Gilian Barrow,
granddaughters of Jarvis Barrow of White Farm. The elder might have
been fifteen, the younger thirteen years. They wore their holiday
dresses. Elspeth had a green silken snood, and Gilian a blue. Elspeth
sang as she stepped from stone to stone:
"But I will get a bonny boat,
And I will sail the sea,
For I maun gang to Love Gregor,
Since he canna come hame to me--"
They did not see Strickland where he stood by the hazels. He let them
go by, watching them with a quiet pleasure. They took the
upward-running lane. Hawthorns in bloom hid them; they were gone like
young deer. Strickland, crossing the stream, went his own way.
The country became more open, with, at this hour, a dreamlike depth
and hush. Down went the sun, but a glow held and wrapped the earth in
hues of faery. When he had walked a mile and more he saw before him
Glenfernie House. In the modern and used moiety seventy years old, in
the ancient keep and ruin of a tower three hundred, it crowned--the
ancient and the latter-day--a craggy hill set with dark woods, and
behind it came up like a wonder lantern, like a bubble of pearl, the
full moon.