The school-room at Glenfernie gave upon the hill's steepest, most
craglike face. A door opened on a hand's-breadth of level turf across
from which rose the broken and ruined wall that once had surrounded
the keep. Ivy overgrew this; below a wide and ragged breach a pine had
set its roots in the hillside. Its top rose bushy above the stones.
Beyond the opening, one saw from the school-room, as through a window,
field and stream and moor, hill and dale. The school-room had been
some old storehouse or office. It was stone walled and floored, with
three small windows and a fireplace. Now it contained a long table
with a bench and three or four chairs, a desk and shelves for books.
One door opened upon the little green and the wall; a second gave
access to a courtyard and the rear of the new house.
Here on a sunny, still August forenoon Strickland and the three
Jardines went through the educational routine. The ages of the pupils
were not sufficiently near together to allow of a massed instruction.
The three made three classes. Jamie and Alice worked in the
school-room, under Strickland's eye. But Alexander had or took a wider
freedom. It was his wont to prepare his task much where he pleased,
coming to the room for recitation or for colloquy upon this or that
aspect of knowledge and the attainment thereof. The irregularity
mattered the less as the eldest Jardine combined with a passion for
personal liberty and out of doors a passion for knowledge. Moreover,
he liked and trusted Strickland. He would go far, but not far enough
to strain the tutor's patience. His father and mother and all about
Glenfernie knew his way and in a measure acquiesced. He had managed to
obtain for himself range. Young as he was, his indrawing, outpushing
force was considerable, and was on the way, Strickland thought, to
increase in power. The tutor had for this pupil a mixed feeling. The
one constant in it was interest. He was to him like a deep lake, clear
enough to see that there was something at the bottom that cast
conflicting lights and hints of shape. It might be a lump of gold, or
a coil of roots which would send up a water-lily, or it might be
something different. He had a feeling that the depths themselves
hardly knew. Or there might be two things of two natures down there in
the lake....
Strickland set Alice to translating a French fable, and Jamie to
reconsidering a neglected page of ancient history. Looking through the
west window, he saw that Alexander had taken his geometry out through
the great rent in the wall. Book and student perched beneath the
pine-tree, in a crook made by rock and brown root, overhanging the
autumn world. Strickland at his own desk dipped quill into ink-well
and continued a letter to a friend in England. The minutes went by.
From the courtyard came a subdued, cheerful household clack and
murmur, voices of men and maids, with once Mrs. Jardine's genial,
vigorous tones, and once the laird's deep bell note, calling to his
dogs. On the western side fell only the sough of the breeze in the
pine.
Jamie ceased the clocklike motion of his body to and fro over the
difficult lesson. "I never understood just what were the Erinnys,
sir?"
"The Erinnys?" Strickland laid down the pen and turned in his chair.
"I'll have to think a moment, to get it straight for you, Jamie....
The Erinnys are the Fates as avengers. They are the vengeance-demanding
part of ourselves objectified, supernaturalized, and named. Of old,
where injury was done, the Erinnys were at hand to pull the roof down
upon the head of the injurer. Their office was to provide unerringly
sword for sword, bitter cup for bitter cup. They never forgot, they
always avenged, though sometimes they took years to do it. They
esteemed themselves, and were esteemed, essential to the moral order.
They are the dark and bitter extreme of justice, given power by the
imagination.... Do you think that you know the chapter now?"
Jamie achieved his recitation, and then was set to mathematics. The
tutor's quill drove on across the page. He looked up.
"Mr. Touris has come to Black Hill?"
Jamie and Alice worshiped interruptions.
"He has twenty carriers bringing fine things all the time--"
"Mother is going to take me when she goes to see Mrs. Alison, his
sister--"
"He is going to spend money and make friends--"
"Mother says Mrs. Alison was most bonny when she was young, but
England may have spoiled her--"
"The minister told the laird that Mr. Touris put fifty pounds in the
plate--"
Strickland held up his hand, and the scholars, sighing, returned to
work. _Buzz, buzz!_ went the bees outside the window. The sun climbed
high. Alexander shut his geometry and came through the break in the
wall and across the span of green to the school-room.
"That's done, Mr. Strickland."
Strickland looked at the paper that his eldest pupil put before him.
"Yes, that is correct. Do you want, this morning, to take up the
reading?"
"I had as well, I suppose."
"If you go to Edinburgh--if you do as your father wishes and apply
yourself to the law--you will need to read well and to speak well. You
do not do badly, but not well enough. So, let's begin!" He put out his
hand and drew from the bookshelf a volume bearing the title, _The
Treasury of Orators_. "Try what you please."
Alexander took the book and moved to the unoccupied window. Here he
half sat, half stood, the morning light flowing in upon him. He opened
the volume and read, with a questioning inflection, the title beneath
his eyes, "'The Cranes of Ibycus'?"
"Yes," assented Strickland. "That is a short, graphic thing."
Alexander read:
"Ibycus, who sang of love, material and divine, in Rhegium
and in Samos, would wander forth in the world and make his
lyre sound now by the sea and now in the mountain.
Wheresoever he went he was clad in the favor of all who
loved song. He became a wandering minstrel-poet. The
shepherd loved him, and the fisher; the trader and the
mechanic sighed when he sang; the soldier and the king felt
him at their hearts. The old returned in their thoughts to
youth, young men and maidens trembled in heavenly sound and
light. You would think that all the world loved Ibycus.
"Corinth, the jeweled city, planned her chariot-races and
her festival of song. The strong, the star-eyed young men,
traveled to Corinth from mainland and from island, and those
inner athletes and starry ones, the poets, traveled. Great
feasting was to be in Corinth, and contests of strength and
flights of song, and in the theater, representation of gods
and men. Ibycus, the wandering poet, would go to Corinth,
there perhaps to receive a crown.
"Ibycus, loved of all who love song, traveled alone, but not
alone. Yet shepherds, or women with their pitchers at the
spring, saw but a poet with a staff and a lyre. Now he was
found upon the highroad, and now the country paths drew him,
and the solemn woods where men most easily find God. And so
he approached Corinth.
"The day was calm and bright, with a lofty, blue, and
stainless sky. The heart of Ibycus grew warm, and there
seemed a brighter light within the light cast by the sun.
Flower and plant and tree and all living things seemed to
him to be glistening and singing, and to have for him, as he
for them, a loving friendship. And, looking up to the sky,
he saw, drawn out stringwise, a flight of cranes, addressed
to Egypt. And between his heart and them ran, like a
rippling path that the sun sends across the sea, a stream of
good-will and understanding. They seemed a part of himself,
winged in the blue heaven, and aware of the part of him that
trod earth, that was entering the grave and shadowy wood
that neighbored Corinth.
"The cranes vanished from overhead, the sky arched without
stain. Ibycus, the sacred poet, with his staff and his lyre,
went on into the wood. Now the light faded and there was
green gloom, like the depths of Father Sea.
"Now robbers lay masked in the wood--"
Jamie and Alice sat very still, listening. Strickland kept his eyes
on the reading youth.
"Now robbers lay masked in the wood--violent men and
treacherous, watching for the unwary, to take from them
goods and, if they resisted, life. In a dark place they lay
in wait, and from thence they sprang upon Ibycus. 'What hast
thou? Part it from thyself and leave it with us!'
"Ibycus, who could sing of the wars of the Greeks and the
Trojans no less well than of the joys of young love, made
stand, held close to him his lyre, but raised on high his
staff of oak. Then from behind one struck him with a keen
knife, and he sank, and lay in his blood. The place was the
edge of a glade, where the trees thinned away and the sky
might be seen overhead. And now, across the blue heaven,
came a second line of the south-ward-going cranes. They flew
low, they flapped their wings, and the wood heard their
crying. Then Ibycus the poet raised his arms to his brothers
the birds. 'Ye cranes, flying between earth and heaven,
avenge shed blood, as is right!'
"Hoarse screamed the cranes flying overhead. Ibycus the poet
closed his eyes, pressed his lips to Mother Earth, and died.
The cranes screamed again, circling the wood, then in a long
line sailed southward through the blue air until they might
neither be heard nor seen. The robbers stared after them.
They laughed, but without mirth. Then, stooping to the body
of Ibycus, they would have rifled it when, hearing a sudden
sound of men's voices entering the wood, they took violent
fright and fled."
Strickland looked still at the reader. Alexander had straightened
himself. He was speaking rather than reading. His voice had
intensities and shadows. His brows had drawn together, his eyes
glowed, and he stood with nostrils somewhat distended. The emotion
that he plainly showed seemed to gather about the injury done and the
appeal of Ibycus. The earlier Ibycus had not seemed greatly to
interest him. Strickland was used to stormy youth, to its passional
moments, sudden glows, burnings, sympathies, defiances, lurid shows of
effects with the causes largely unapparent. It was his trade to know
youth, and he had a psychologist's interest. He said now to himself,
"There is something in his character that connects itself with, that
responds to, the idea of vengeance." There came into his memory the
laird's talk, the evening of Mr. Touris's visit, in June. Glenfernie,
who would have wrestled with Grierson of Lagg at the edge of the pit;
Glenfernie's mother and father, who might have had much the same
feeling; their forebears beyond them with like sensations toward the
Griersons of their day.... The long line of them--the long line of
mankind--injured and injurers....
"Travelers through the wood, whose voices the robbers heard,
found Ibycus the poet lying upon the ground, ravished of
life. It chanced that he had been known of them, known and
loved. Great mourning arose, and vain search for them who
had done this wrong. But those strong, wicked ones were
gone, fled from their haunts, fled from the wood afar to
Corinth, for the god Pan had thrown against them a pine
cone. So the travelers took the body of Ibycus and bore it
with them to Corinth.
"A poet had been slain upon the threshold of the house of
song. Sacred blood had spattered the white robes of a queen
dressed for jubilee. Evil unreturned to its doers must
darken the sunshine of the famous days. Corinth uttered a
cry of lamentation and wrath. 'Where are the ill-doers, the
spillers of blood, that we may spill their blood and avenge
Ibycus, showing the gods that we are their helpers?' But
those robbers and murderers might not be found. And the body
of Ibycus was consumed upon a funeral pyre.
"The festival hours went by in Corinth. And now began to
fill the amphitheater where might find room a host for
number like the acorns of Dodona. The throng was huge, the
sound that it made like the shock of ocean. Around, tier
above tier, swept the rows, and for roof there was the blue
and sunny air. Then the voice of the sea hushed, for now
entered the many-numbered chorus. Slow-circling, it sang of
mighty Fate: '_For every word shall have its echo, and every
deed shall see its face. The word shall say, "Is it my
echo?" and the deed shall say, "Is it my face?"_'--
"The chorus passes, singing. The voices die, there falls a
silence, sent as it were from inner space. The open sky is
above the amphitheater. And now there comes, from north to
south, sailing that sea above, high, but not so high that
their shape is indistinguishable, a long flight of cranes.
Heads move, eyes are raised, but none know why that interest
is so keen, so still. Then from out the throng rises, struck
with forgetfulness of gathered Corinth and of its own
reasons for being dumb as is the stone, a man's voice, and
the fear that Pan gives ran yet around in that voice. 'See,
brother, see! The cranes of Ibycus!'
"'Ibycus!' The crowd about those men pressed in upon them.
'What do you know of Ibycus?' And great Pan drove them to
show in their faces what they knew. So Corinth took--"
Alexander Jardine shut the book and, leaving the window, dropped it
upon the table. His hand shook, his face was convulsed. "I've read as
far as needs be. Those things strike me like hammers!" With suddenness
he turned and was gone.
Strickland was aware that he might not return that day to the
school-room, perhaps not to the house. He went out of the west door
and across the grassy space to the gap in the wall, through which he
disappeared. Beyond was the rough descent to wood and stream.
Jamie spoke: "He's a queer body! He says he thinks that he lived a
long time ago, and then a shorter time ago, and then now. He says that
some days he sees it all come up in a kind of dark desert."
Alice put in her word, "Mother says he's many in one, and that the
many and one don't yet recognize each other."
"Your mother is a wise woman," said the tutor. "Let me see how the
work goes."
The pine-tree, outside the wall, overhung a rude natural stairway of
stony ledge and outcropping root with patches of moss and heath. Down
this went Alexander into a cool dimness of fir and oak and birch,
watered by a little stream. He kneeled by this, he cooled face and
hands in the water, then flung himself beneath a tree and, burying his
head in his arms, lay still. The waves within subsided, sank to a
long, deep swell, then from that to quiet. The door that wind and tide
had beaten open shut again. Alexander lay without thinking, without
overmuch feeling. At last, turning, he opened his eyes upon the
tree-tops and the August sky. The door was shut upon tales of injury
and revenge. Between boy and man, he lay in a yearning stillness,
colors and sounds and dim poetic strains his ministers of grace. This
lasted for a time, then he rose, first to a sitting posture, then to
his feet. Crows flew through the wood; he had a glimpse of yellow
fields and purple heath. He set forth upon one of the long rambles
which were a prized part of life.
An hour or so later he stopped at a cotter's, some miles from home. An
old man and a woman gave him an oat cake and a drink of home-brewed.
He was fond of folk like these--at home with them and they with him.
There was no need to make talk, but he sat and looked at the marigolds
while the woman moved about and the old man wove rushes into mats.
From here he took to the hills and walked awhile with a shepherd
numbering his sheep. Finally, in mid-afternoon, he found himself upon
a heath, bare of trees, lifted and purple.
He sat down amid the warm bloom; he lay down. Within was youth's blind
tumult and longing, a passioning for he knew not what. "I wish that
there were great things in my life. I wish that I were a discoverer,
sailing like Columbus. I wish that I had a friend--"
He fell into a day-dream, lapped there in warm purple waves, hearing
the bees' interminable murmur. He faced, across a narrow vale, an
abrupt, curiously shaped hill, dark with outstanding granite and with
fir-trees. Where at the eastern end it broke away, where at its base
the vale widened, shone among the lively green of elms turrets and
chimneys of a large house. "Black Hill--Black Hill--Black Hill...."
A youth of about his own age came up the path from the vale.
Alexander, lying amid the heath, caught at some distance the whole
figure, but as he approached lost him. Then, near at hand, the head
rose above the brow of the ridge. It was a handsome head, with a cap
and feather, with gold-brown hair lightly clustering, and a
countenance of spirit and daring with something subtle rubbed in.
Head, shoulders, a supple figure, not so tall nor so largely made as
was Glenfernie's heir, all came upon the purple hilltop.