Strickland, in the deep summer glen, saw before him the feather of
smoke from Mother Binning's cot. The singing stream ran clearly, the
sky arched blue above. The air held calm and fine, filled as it were
with golden points. He met a white hen and her brood, he heard the
slow drone of Mother Binning's wheel. She sat in the doorway, an old
wise wife, active still.
"Eh, mon, and it's you!--Wish, and afttimes ye'll get!" She pushed her
wheel aside. "I've had a feeling a' the day!"
Strickland leaned against her ash-tree. "It's high summer, Mother--one
of the poised, blissful days."
"Aye. I've a feeling.... Hae ye ony news at the House?"
"Alice sings beautifully this summer. Jamie is marrying down in
England--beauty and worth he says, and they say."
"Miss Alice doesna marry?"
"She's not the marrying kind, she says."
"Eh, then! She's bonny and gude, juist the same! Did ye come by White
Farm?"
"Yes. Jarvis Barrow fails. He sits under his fir-tree, with his Bible
beside him and his eyes on the hills. Littlefarm manages now for White
Farm."
"Robin's sunny and keen. But he aye irked Jarvis with his profane
sangs." She drew out the adjective with a humorous downward drag of
her lip.
Strickland smiled. "The old man's softer now. You see that by the
places at which his Bible opens."
"Oh aye! We're journeyers--rock and tree and Kelpie's Pool with the
rest of us."
She seemed to catch her own speech and look at it. "That's a word I
hae been wanting the morn!--The Kelpie's Pool, with the moor sae green
and purple around it." She sat bent forward, her wrinkled hands in her
lap, her eyes, rather wide, fixed upon the ash-tree.
"We have not heard from the laird," said Strickland, "this long time."
"The laird--now there! What ye want further comes when the mind
strains and then waits! I see in one ring the day and Glenfernie and
yonder water. Wherever the laird be, he thinks to-day of Scotland."
"I wish that he would think to returning," said Strickland. He had
been leaning against the doorpost. Now he straightened himself. "I
will go on as far as the pool."
Mother Binning loosed her hands. "Did ye have that thought when ye
left hame?"
"No, I believe not."
"Gae on, then! The day's bonny, and the Lord's gude has a wide ring!"
Strickland walking on, left the stream and the glen head. Now he was
upon the moor. It dipped and rose like a Titan wave of a Titan sea.
Its long, long unbroken crest, clean line against clean space,
brought a sense of quiet, distance, might. Here solitude was at home.
Now Strickland moved, and now he stood and watched the quiet. Turning
at last a shoulder of the moor, he saw at some distance below him the
pool, like a small mirror. He descended toward it, without noise over
the springy earth.
A horse appeared between him and the water. Strickland felt a most
involuntary startling and thrill--then half laughed to think that he
had feared that he saw the water-steed, the kelpie. The horse was
fastened to a stake that once had been the bole of an ancient willow.
It grazed around--somewhere would be a master.... Presently
Strickland's eye found the latter--a man lying upon the moorside, just
above the water. Again with a shock and thrill--though not like the
first--it came to him who it was.
The laird of Glenfernie lay very still, his eyes upon the Kelpie's
Pool. His old tutor, long his friend, quiet and stanch, gazed unseen.
When he had moved a few feet an outcropping of rock hid his form, but
his eyes could still dwell upon the pool and the man its visitor. He
turned to go away, then he stood still.
"What if he means a closer going yet?" Strickland settled back against
the rock. "He would loose his horse first--he would not leave it
fastened here. If he does that then I will go down to him."
Glenfernie lay still. There was no wind to-day. The reeds stood
straight, the willow leaves slept, the water stayed like dusky glass.
The air, pure and light, hung at rest in the ether. Minutes went by,
an hour. He might, Strickland thought, have lain there a long time. At
last he sat up, rose, began to walk around the pool. He went around it
thrice. Then again he sat down, his arms upon his knees, watching the
dusk water. He did not go nor sit like one overwrought or frenzied or
despairing. His great frame, his bearing, the air of him, had
quietude, but not listlessness; there seemed at once calm and
intensity as of a still center that had flung off the storm. Time
flowed. Thought Strickland:
"He is as far as I am from death in that water. I'll cease to spy."
He moved away, moss and ling muffling step, gained and dipped behind
the shoulder of the moor. The horse grazed on. The laird sat still,
his arms upon his knees, his head a little lifted, his eyes crossing
the Kelpie's Pool to the wave-line against the sky.
Strickland went to where the moor path ran by the outermost trees of
the glen head. Here he sat down beneath an oak and waited. Another
hour passed; then he heard the horse's hoofs. He rose and met
Glenfernie home-returning.
"It is good to see you, Strickland!"
"I found you yonder by the Kelpie's Pool. Then I came here and
waited."
"I have spent hours there.... They were not unhappy. They were not at
all unhappy."
They moved together along the moor track, the horse following.
"I am glad and glad again that you have come--"
"I have been coming a good while. But there were preventions."
"We have heard nothing direct for almost a year."
"Then my letters did not reach you. I wrote, but knew that they might
not. There is the smoke from Mother Binning's cot." He stood still to
watch the mounting feather. "I remember when first I saw that, a
six-year-old, climbing the glen with my father, carried on his
shoulder when I was tired. I thought it was a hut in a fairy-tale....
So it is!"
To Strickland the remarkable thing lay in the lack of strain, the
simplicity and fullness. Glenfernie was unfeignedly glad to see him,
glad to see home shapes and colors. The blue feather among the trees
had simply pleased him as it could not please a heart fastened to rage
and sorrow. The stream of memories that it had beckoned--many others,
it must be, besides that of the six-year-old's visit--seemed to have
washed itself clear, to have disintegrated, dissolved venom and
stinging. Strickland, pondering even while he talked, found the word
he wanted: "Comprehensiveness.... He always tended to that."
Said Glenfernie, "I've had another birth, Strickland, and all things
are the same and yet not the same." He gave it as an explanation, but
then left it. They were going the moorland way to Glenfernie House. He
was looking from side to side, recovering old landscape in sweep and
in detail. Bit by bit, as they came to it, Strickland gave him the
country news. At last there was the house before them, among the firs
and oaks, topping the crag. They came into the wood at the base of the
hill. The stream--the trees--above, the broken, ancient wall, the
roofs of the new house that was not so new, the old, outstanding keep.
The whole rested, mellowed, lifted, still, against a serene and azure
sky. Alexander stood and gazed.
"The keep. The pine still knots and clings there by the school-room.
Do you remember, Strickland, a day when you set me to read 'The Cranes
of Ibycus'?"
"I remember."
"Life within life, and sky above sky!--I hear Bran!"
* * * * *
They mounted the hill. It seemed to run before them that the laird had
come home. Bran and Davie and the men and maids and Alice, a bonny
woman, and Mrs. Grizel, very little withered, exclaimed and ran.
Tibbie Ross was there that day, and Black Alan neighed from his stall.
Even the waving trees--even the flowers in the garden--Home, and its
taste and fragrance--its dear, close emanations....
That evening at supper Mrs. Grizel made a remark. She leaned back in
her chair and looked at Glenfernie. "I never thought you like your
mother before! Oh aye! there's your father, too, and a kind of grand
man he was, for all that he saw things dark. But will you look, Mr.
Strickland, and see Margaret--"
Much later, from his own room, Strickland, gazing forth, saw light in
the keep. Alexander would be sitting there among the books and every
ancient memorial. Strickland felt a touch of doubt and apprehension.
Suppose that to-morrow should find not this Alexander, at once old and
new, but only the Alexander who had ridden from Glenfernie, who had
shipped to Lisbon, nearly three years ago? To-day's deep satisfaction
only a dream! Strickland shook off the fear.
"He breathed lasting growth.... O Christ! the help for all in winged
men!"
He turned to his bed. Lying awake he went in imagination to the
desert, to the Eastern places, that in few words the laird had
painted.
And in the morning he found still the old-new Alexander. He saw that
the new had always been in the old, the oak in the acorn.... There was
a great, sane naturalness in the alteration, in the advance.
Strickland caught glimpses of larger orders.
"_I will make thee ruler over many things._"
The day was deep and bright. The laird fell at once into the old
routine. For none at Glenfernie was there restlessness; there was only
ache gone, and a feeling of fulfilling. Mrs. Grizel pattered to and
fro. Alice sang like a lark, gathering pansy seed from her garden.
Phemie and Eppie sang. The men whistled at their work. Davie
discoursed to himself. But Tibbie Ross was wild to get away early and
to the village with the news. By the foot of the hill she began to
meet wayfarers.
"Oh, aye, this is the real weather! Did ye know--"
Alexander did not leave home that day. In their old work-room he
listened to Strickland's account of his stewardship.
"Strickland, I love you!" he said, when it was all given.
He wrote to Jamie; he sat in the garden seat built against the garden
wall and watched Alice as she moved from plant to plant.
"You do not say much," thought Alice, "but I like you--I like you--I
like you!"
In the afternoon Strickland met him coming from the little green
beyond the school-room.
"I have been out through the wall, under the old pine. I seemed to
hold many things in the palm of the hand.... I believe that you know
what it is to make essences."
After bedtime Strickland saw again the light in the keep. But he had
ceased to fear. "Oh All-Being, how rich and stately and various and
surprising you are!" In the morning, outside in the court, he found
Black Alan saddled.
"The laird will be riding to Black Hill," said Tam Dickson.