THE WELL-HOUSE OF EARLSTOUN.
So as soon as the soldier was snugly housed with the servant lass, the
two women came to me, where I sat at the back of the door of the
well-house. Chiefly I wanted to hear what had brought Maisie of the
Duchrae so far from home as the house of Earlstoun. It seemed to betoken
some ill befallen my good friends by the Grenoch water-side. But my
mother stooped down and put her arms about me. She declared that she
would have me taken up to the west garret under the rigging, where, she
said, none of the soldiers had ever been. But there I would in no wise
go, for well I knew that so soon as she had me there, and a dozen
soldiers between me and a dash for liberty, she would forthwith never
rest until she had me out again.
Then the next idea was that I should go to the wattled platform on the
oak, to which Sandy resorted; but I had fallen into a violent horror of
shaking and hot flushes alternating with deadly cold, so that to bide
night and day in the sole covert of a tree looked like my death.
At last Maisie Lennox, who had a fine discernment for places of
concealment in the old days when we two used to play at
"Bogle-about-the-Stacks" at the Duchrae, cast an eye up at the roof of
the well-house.
"I declare, I think there is a chamber up there," she said, and stood a
moment considering.
"Give me an ease up!" she said quietly to my mother. She did everything
quietly.
"How can there be such a place and I not know it?" said my mother. "Have
I not been about the tower these thirty years?"
But Maisie thought otherwise of the matter, and without more ado she set
her little feet in the nicks of the stones, which were rough-set like
the inside of a chimney.
Then putting her palm flat above her, she pushed an iron-ringed
trap-door open, lifted herself level with it, and so disappeared from
our view. We could hear her groping above us, and sometimes little
stones and lime pellets fell tinkling into the well. So we remained
beneath waiting for her report, and I hoped that it might not be long,
for I felt that soon I must lay me down and die, so terrible was the
tightness about my head.
"There is a chamber here," she cried at last. "It is low in the rigging
and part of the roof is broken towards the trees, but the ivy hides it
and the hole cannot be seen from the house."
"The very place! Well done, young lass!" said my mother--much pleased,
even though she had not found it herself. For she was a remarkable
woman.
Maisie looked over the edge.
"Give me your hand?" she said.
Now there is this curious thing about this lass ever since she was in
short coats, that she not only knew her own mind in every emergency, but
also compelled the minds of every one else. At that moment it seemed as
natural that I should obey her, and also for my mother to assist her, as
if she had been a queen commanding obedience. Yet she hardly ever spoke
above her breath, and always rather as though she were venturing a
suggestion. This is not what any one can ever learn. It is a natural
gift. Now there is my brother Sandy. He has a commanding way with him
certainly. He gets himself obeyed. But at what an expenditure of breath.
You can hear him at the Mains of Barskeoch telling the lass to put on
the porridge pot. And he cannot get his feet wet and be needing a change
of stockings, without the Ardoch folk over the hill hearing all about
it.
But I am telling of the well-house.
"Give me your hand," said the lass Maisie down from the trap-door. It is
a strange thing that I never dreamed of disobeying. So I put out my
hand, and in a trice I was up beside her.
My mother followed us and we looked about. It was a little room and had
long been given over to the birds. I marvelled much that in our
adventurous youth, Sandy and I had never lighted upon it. But I knew the
reason to be that we had a wholesome dread of the well, having been told
a story about a little boy who tumbled into it in the act of
disobedience and so was drowned. We heard also what had become of him
afterwards, which discouraged us from the forbidden task of exploration.
I think no one had been in the place since the joiners left it, for the
shavings yet lay in the corner, among all that the birds and the wild
bees had brought to it since.
My mother stayed beside me while Maisie went to bring me a hot drink,
for the shuddering grew upon me, and I began to have fierce pains in my
back and legs. My mother told me how that the main guard of the soldiers
had been a week away over in the direction of Minnyhive, all but a
sergeant's file that were left to keep the castle. To-day all these men,
except the sentry, were down drinking at the change-house in the
clachan, and not till about midnight would they come roaring home.
She also told me (which I much yearned to know), that the Duchrae had at
last been turned out, and that old Anton had betaken himself to the
hills. Maisie, his daughter, had come to the neighbourhood with Margaret
Wilson of Glen Vernock, the bright little lass from the Shireside whom I
had first seen during my sojourn in Balmaghie. Margaret Wilson had
friends over at the farm of Bogue on the Garpelside. Very kind to the
hill-folk they were, though in good enough repute with the Government up
till this present time. From there Maisie Lennox had come up to
Earlstoun, to tell my mother all that she knew of myself and my cousin
Wat. Then, because the two women loved to talk the one to the other, at
Earlstoun she abode ever since, and there I found her.
So in the well-house I remained day by day in safety all through my
sickness.
The chamber over the well was a fine place for prayer and meditation. At
first I thought that each turn of the sentry would surely bring him up
the trap-door with sword and musket pointed at me, and I had little
comfort in my lodging. But gradually, by my falling to the praying and
by the action of time and use, I minded the comings and goings of the
soldiers no more than those of the doves that came in to see me at the
broken part of the roof, and went out again with a wild flutter of their
wings, leaving a little woolly feather or two floating behind them.
And often as I lay I minded me how I had heard Mr. Peden say at the
Conventicle that "the prayers of the saints are like to a fire which at
first gives off only smoke and heat, but or all be done breaketh out
into a clear light and comfortable flame."
These were times of great peace for us, when the soldiers and the young
lairds that rode with them for the horsemanship part of it, went off on
their excursions, and came not back till late at eventide, with many of
the Glenkens wives' chuckies swinging head down at their saddle bows.