The bright autumn sank into November, November winds and mists into a
muffled, gray-roofed, white-floored December. And still the laird of
Glenfernie lived with the work of the estate and, when that was done,
and when the long, lonely, rambling daily walk or ride was over, with
books. The room in the keep had now many books. He sat among them, and
he built his fire higher, and his candles burned into late night.
Whether he read or did not read, he stayed among them and drew what
restless comfort he might. Strickland, from his own high room, waking
in the night, saw the loophole slit of light.
He felt concern. The change that had come to his old pupil was marked
enough. Strickland's mind dwelt on the old laird. Was that the
personality, not of one, but of two, of the whole line, perhaps,
developing all the time, step by step with what seemed the plastic,
otherwise, free time of youth, appearing always in due season, when
its hour struck? Would Alexander, with minor differences, repeat his
father? How of the mother? Would the father drown the mother? In the
enormous all-one, the huge blend, what would arrive? Out of all
fathers and mothers, out of all causes?
It could not be said that Alexander was surly. Nor, if the weather
was dark with him, that he tried to shake his darkness into others'
skies. Nor that he meanly succumbed to the weight, whatever it was,
that bore upon him. He did his work, and achieved at least the show of
equanimity. Strickland wondered. What was it that had happened? It
never occurred to him that it had happened here in this dale. But in
all that life of Alexander's in the wider world there must needs have
been relationships of lands established. Somewhere, something had
happened to overcloud his day, to uncover ancestral resemblances,
possibilities. Something, somewhere, and he had had news of it this
autumn.... It happened that Strickland had never seen Glenfernie with
Elspeth Barrow.
Mrs. Grizel was not observant. So that her nephew came to breakfast,
dinner, and supper, so that he was not averse to casual speech of
household interests, so that he seemed to keep his health, so that he
gave her now and then words and a kiss of affection, she was willing
to believe that persons addicted to books and the company of
themselves had a right to stillness and gravity. Alice stayed in
Edinburgh; Jamie soldiered it in Flanders. Strickland wrote and
computed for and with the laird, then watched him forth, a solitary
figure, by the fir-trees, by the leafless trees, and down the circling
road into the winter country. Or he saw firelight in the keep and knew
that Alexander walked to and fro, to and fro, or sat bowed over a
book. Late at night, waking, he saw that Glenfernie still watched.
It was not Ian Rullock nor anything to do with him that had helped on
this sharp alteration, this turn into some Cimmerian stretch of the
mind's or the emotions' vast landscape. If Strickland had at first
wondered if this might be the case, the thought vanished. Glenfernie,
free to speak of Ian, spoke freely, with the relief of there, at
least, a sunny day. It somewhat amazed and disquieted, even while it
touched, the older man of quiet passions and even ways, the old
strength of this friendship. Glenfernie seemed to brood with a
mother-passion over Ian. To an extent here he confided in Strickland.
The latter knew of the worry about Jacobite plots and the drawing of
Ian into that vortex--Ian known now to be in Paris, writing thence
twice or thrice during this autumn and early winter, letters that came
to Glenfernie's hand by unusual channels, smacking all of them of
Jacobite or High Tory transmissals. Strickland did not see these
letters. Of them Alexander said only that Ian wrote as usual, except
that he made no reference to sere leaves turning green or a dead staff
budding.
In the room with only the loophole windows, by the firelight,
Alexander read over again the second of these letters. "So you have
loved and lost, old Steadfast? Let it not grieve you too much!" And
that was all of that. And it pleased Alexander that it was all. Ian
was too wise to touch and finger the heart. Ian, Ian, rich and deep
and himself almost! Ten thousand Ian recollections pressed in upon
Alexander. Let Ian, an he would, go a-lusting after old dynasties! Yet
was he Ian! In these months it was Ian memories that chiefly gave
Alexander comfort.
They gave beyond what, at this time, Mrs. Alison could give. At
considerable intervals he went to Black Hill. But his old friend lived
in a rare, upland air, and he could not yet find rest in her clime.
She saw that.
"It's for after a while, isn't it, Alexander? Oh, after a while you'll
see that it is the breathing, living air! But do not feel now that you
are in duty bound to come here. Wait until you feel like coming, and
never think that I'll be hurt--"
"I am a marsh thing," he said. "I feel dull and still and cold, and
over me is a heavy atmosphere filled with motes. Forgive me and let me
come to you farther on and higher up."
He went back to the gray crag, Glenfernie House and the room in the
keep, the fire and his books, and a brooding traveling over the past,
and, like a pool of gold in a long arctic night, the image, nested and
warm, of Ian. Love was lost, but there stayed the ancient, ancient
friend.
Two weeks before Christmas Alice came home, bright as a rose. She
talked of a thousand events, large and small. Glenfernie listened,
smiled, asked questions, praised her, and said it was good to have
brightness in the house.
"Aye, it is!" she answered. "How grave and old you and Mr. Strickland
and the books and the hall and Bran look!"
"It's heigho! for Jamie, isn't it?" asked Alexander. "Winter makes us
look old. Wait till springtime!"
That evening she waylaid Strickland. "What is the matter with
Alexander?"
"I don't know."
"He looks five years older. He looks as though he had been through
wars."
"Perhaps he has. I don't know what it is," said Strickland, soberly.
"Do you think," said Alice--"do you think he could have had--oh,
somewhere out in the world!--a love-affair, and it ended badly? She
died, or there was a rival, or something like that, and he has just
heard of it?"
"You have been reading novels," said Strickland. "And yet--!"
That night, seeing from his own window the light in the keep, he
turned to his bed with the thought of the havoc of love. Lying there
with open eyes he saw in procession Unhappy Love. He lay long awake,
but at last he turned and addressed himself to sleep. "He's a strong
climber! Whatever it is, maybe he'll climb out of it."
But in the keep, Alexander, sitting by the fire with lowered head and
hanging hands, saw not the time when he would climb out of it....
He went no more to White Farm. He went, though not every Sunday, to
kirk and sat with his aunt and with Strickland in the laird's boxlike,
curtained pew. Mr. M'Nab preached of original sin and ineffable
condemnation, and of the few, the very, very few, saved as by fire. He
saw Jarvis Barrow sitting motionless, sternly agreeing, and beyond him
Jenny Barrow and then Elspeth and Gilian. Out of kirk, in the
kirkyard, he gave them good day. He studied to keep strangeness out
of his manner; an onlooker would note only a somewhat silent,
preoccupied laird. He might be pondering the sermon. Mr. M'Nab's
sermons were calculated to arouse alarm and concern--or, in the case
of the justified, stern triumph--in the human breast. White Farm made
no quarrel with the laird for that quietude and withdrawing. In the
autumn he had told Jarvis Barrow of that hour with Elspeth in the
stubble-field. The old man listened, then, "They are strange warks,
women!" he said, and almost immediately went on to speak of other
things. There seemed no sympathy and no regret for the earthly
happening. But he liked to debate with the laird election and the
perseverance of the saints.
Jenny Barrow, only, could not be held from exclamation over
Glenfernie's defection. "Why does he na come as he used to? Wha's done
aught to him or said a word to gie offense?" She talked to Menie and
Merran since Elspeth and Gilian gave her notice that they were wearied
of the subject. Perhaps Jenny's concern with it kept her from the
perception that not Glenfernie only was changing or had changed.
Elspeth--! But Elspeth had been always a dreamer, rather silent, a
listener rather than a speaker. Jenny did not look around corners; the
overt sufficed for a bustling, good-natured life. Gilian's arrival,
moreover, made for a diversion of attention. By the time novelty
subsided again into every day an altered Elspeth had so fitted into
the frame of life that Jenny was unaware of alteration.
But Gilian was not Jenny.
Each of Jarvis Barrow's granddaughters had her own small bedroom.
Three nights after Gilian's home-coming she came, when the candles
were out, into Elspeth's room. It was September and, for the season,
warm. A great round moon poured its light into the little room.
Elspeth was seated upon her bed. Her hair was loosened and fell over
her white gown. Her feet were under her; she sat like an Eastern
carving, still in the moonlight.
"Elspeth!"
Elspeth took a moment to come back to White Farm. "What is it,
Gilian?"
Gilian moved to the window and sat in it. She had not undressed. The
moon silvered her, too. "What has happened, Elspeth?"
"Naught. What should happen?"
"It's no use telling me that.--We've been away from each other almost
a year. I know that I've changed, grown, in that time, and it's
natural that you should do the same. But it's something besides that!"
Elspeth laughed and her laughter was like a little, cold, mirthless
chime of silver bells. "You're fanciful, Gilian!... We're no longer
lassies; we're women! So the colors of things get a little
different--that's all!"
"Don't you love me, Elspeth?"
"Yes, I love you. What has that to do with it?"
"Has it not? Has love naught to do with it? Love at all--all love?"
Elspeth parted her long dark hair into two waves, drew it before her,
and began to braid it, sitting still, her limbs under her, upon the
bed. "I saw you on the moor walking and talking with grandfather.
What did he say to you?"
"You are changed and I said that you were changed. He had not
noticed--he would not be like to notice! Then he told me about the
laird and you."
"Yes. About the laird and me."
"You couldn't love him? They say he is a fine man."
"No, I couldn't love him. I like him. He understands. No one is to
blame."
"But if it is not that, what is it--what is it, Elspeth?"
"It's naught--naught--naught, I tell you!"
"It's a strange naught that makes you like a dark lady in a
ballad-book!"
Elspeth laughed again. "Didn't I say that you were fanciful? It's late
and I am sleepy."
That had been while the leaves were still upon the trees. The next
morning and thenceforward Elspeth seemed to make a point of
cheerfulness. It passed with her aunt and the helpers in the house.
Jarvis Barrow appeared to take no especial note if women laughed or
sighed, so long as they lived irreproachably.
The leaves bronzed, the autumn rains came, the leaves fell, the trees
stood bare, the winds began to blow, there fell the first snowflakes.
Gilian, walking home from the town, was overtaken on the moor by Robin
Greenlaw.
"Where is Elspeth?"
"We are making our winter dresses. She would not leave her sewing."
The cousins walked upon the moor path together. Gilian was fairer and
more strongly made than Elspeth. They walked in silence; then said
Robin:
"You're the old Gilian, but I'm sure I miss the old Elspeth!"
"I think, myself, she's gone visiting! I rack and rack my brains to
find what grief could have come to Elspeth. She will not help me."
"Gilian, could it be that, after all, her heart is set on the laird?"
"Did you know about that?"
"In part I guessed, watching them together. And then I saw how
Glenfernie oldened in a night. Then, being with my uncle one day, he
let drop a word that I followed up. I led him on and he told me.
Glenfernie acted like a true man."
"If there's one thing of which I'm sure it is that she hardly thinks
of him from Sunday to Sunday. She thinks then for a little because she
sees him in kirk--but that passes, too!"
"Then what is it?"
"I don't know. I don't know of anybody else. Maybe no outer thing has
anything to do with it. Sometimes we just have drumlie, dreary seasons
and we do not know why.... She loves the spring. Maybe when spring
comes she'll be Elspeth once more!"
"I hope so," said Greenlaw. "Spring makes all the world bonny again."
That was in November. On Christmas Eve Elspeth Barrow drowned herself
in the Kelpie's Pool.