Chapter 24

Two days after this Glenfernie rode to White Farm. Jenny Barrow met him with exclamations.

"Oh, Mr. Alexander! Oh, Glenfernie! And they say that you are amaist as weel as ever--but to me you look twelve years older! Eh, and this warld has brought gray into _my_ hair! Father's gane to kirk session, and Gilian's awa'."

He sat down beside her. Her hands went on paring apples, while her eyes and tongue were busy elsewhere.

"They say you're gaeing to travel."

"Yes. I'm starting very soon."

"It's na _said oot_--but a kind of whisper's been gaeing around." She hesitated, then, "Are you gaeing after him, Glenfernie?"

"Yes."

Jenny put down her knife and apple. She drew a long breath, so that her bosom heaved under her striped gown. A bright color came into her cheeks. She laughed. "Aweel, I wadna spare him if I were you!"

He sat with her longer than he had done with Mrs. Alison. He felt nearer to her. He could be friends with her, while he moved from the other as from a bloodless wraith. Here breathed freely all the strong vindications! He sat, sincere and strong, and sincere and strong was the countrywoman beside him.

"Oh aye!" said Jenny. "He's a villain, and I wad gie him all that he gave of villainy!"

"That is right," said Alexander, "to look at it simply!" He felt that those were his friends who felt in this as did he.

On the moor, riding homeward, he saw before him Jarvis Barrow. Dismounting, he met the old man beside a cairn, placed there so long ago that there was only an elfin story for the deeds it commemorated.

"Gude day, Glenfernie! So that Hieland traitor did not slay ye?"

"No."

Jarvis Barrow, white-headed, strong-featured, far yet, it seemed, from incapacitating old age, took his seat upon a great stone loosened from the mass. He leaned upon his staff; his collie lay at his feet. "Many wad say a lang time, with the healing in it of lang time, since a fause lover sang in the ear of my granddaughter, in the glen there!"

"Aye, many would say it."

"I say 'a fause lover.' But the ane to whom she truly listened is an aulder serpent than he ... wae to her!"

"No, no!"

"But I say 'aye!' I am na weak! She that worked evil and looseness, harlotry, strife, and shame, shall she na have her hire? As, Sunday by Sunday, I wad ha' set her in kirk, before the congregation, for the stern rebuking of her sin, so, mak no doubt, the Lord pursues her now! Aye, He shakes His wrath before her eyes! Wherever she turns she sees 'Fornicatress' writ in flames!"

"No!"

"But aye!"

"Where she was mistaken--where, maybe, she was wilfully blind--she must learn. Not the learning better, but the old mistake until it is lost in knowledge, will clothe itself in suffering! But that is but a part of her! If there is error within, there is also Michael within to make it of naught! She releases herself. It is horrible to me to see you angered against her, for you do not discriminate--and you are your Michael, but not hers!"

"Adam is speaking--still the woman's lover! I'm not for contending with you. She tore my heart working folly in my house, and an ill example, and for herself condemnation!"

"Leave her alone! She has had great unhappiness!" He moved the small stones of the cairn with his fingers. "I am going away from Glenfernie."

"Aye. It was in mind that ye would! You and he were great friends."

"The greater foes now."

"I gie ye full understanding there!"

"With my father, those he hated were beyond his touch. So he walked among shadows only. But to me this world is a not unknown wood where roves, alive and insolent, my utter enemy! I can touch him and I will touch him!"

"Not you, but the Lord Wha abides not evil!... How sune will ye be gaeing, Glenfernie?"

"As soon as I can ride far. As soon as everything is in order here. I know that I am going, but I do not know if I am returning."

"I haud na with dueling. It's un-Christian. But mony's the ancient gude man that Jehovah used for sword! Aye, and approved the sword that he used--calling him faithful servant and man after His heart! I am na judging."

From the moor Glenfernie rode through the village. Folk spoke to him, looked after him; children about the doors called to others, "It's tha laird on Black Alan!" Old and young women, distaff or pan or pot or pitcher in hand, turned head, gazed, spoke to themselves or to one another. The Jardine Arms looked out of doors. "He's unco like tha auld laird!" Auld Willy, that was over a hundred, raised a piping voice, "Did ye young things remember Gawin Elliot that was his great-grandfather ye'd be saying, 'Ye might think it was Gawin Elliot that was hangit!'" Mrs. Macmurdo came to her shop door. "Eh, the laird, wi' all the straw of all that's past alight in his heart!"

Alexander answered the "good days," but he did not draw rein. He rode slowly up the steep village street and over the bare waste bit of hill until here was the manse, with the kirk beyond it. Coming out of the manse gate was the minister. Glenfernie checked his mare. All around spread a bare and lonely hilltop. The manse and the kirk and the minister's figure buttressed each the others with a grim strength. The wind swept around them and around Glenfernie.

Mr. M'Nab, standing beside the laird, spoke earnestly. "We rejoice, Glenfernie, that you are about once more! There is the making in you of a grand man, like your father. It would have been down-spiriting if that son of Belial had again triumphed in mischief. The weak would have found it so."

"What is triumph?"

"Ye may well ask that! And yet," said M'Nab, "I know. It is the warm-feeling cloak that Good when it hath been naked wraps around it, seeing the spoiler spoiled and the wicked fallen into the pit that he digged!"

"Aye, the naked Good."

The minister looked afar, a dark glow and energy in his thin face. "They are in prison, and the scaffolds groan--they who would out with the Kirk and a Protestant king and in with the French and popery!"

"Your general wrong," said Glenfernie, "barbed and feathered also for a Scots minister's own inmost nerve! And is not my wrong general likewise? Who hates and punishes falsity, though it were found in his own self, acts for the common good!"

"Aye!" said the minister. "But there must be assurance that God calls you and that you hate the sin and not the sinner!"

"Who assures the assurances? Still it is I!"

Glenfernie rode on. Mr. M'Nab looked after him with a darkling brow. "That was heathenish--!"

Alexander passed kirk and kirkyard. He went home and sat in the room in the keep, under his hand paper upon which he made figures, diagrams, words, and sentences. When the next day came he did not ride, but walked. He walked over the hills, with the kirk spire before him lifting toward a vast, blue serenity. Presently he came in sight of the kirkyard, its gravestones and yew-trees. He had met few persons upon the road, and here on the hilltop held to-day a balmy silence and solitude. As he approached the gate, to which there mounted five ancient, rounded steps of stone, he saw sitting on one of these a woman with a basket of flowers. Nearer still, he found that it was Gilian Barrow.

She waited for him to come up to her. He took his place upon the steps. All around hung still and sunny space. The basket of flowers between them was heaped with marigolds, pinks, and pansies.

"For Elspeth," said Gilian.

"It is almost two years. You have ceased to grieve?"

"Ah no! But one learns how to marry grief and gladness."

"Have you learned that? That is a long lesson. But some are quicker than others or had learned much beforehand.... Where is Elspeth?"

"Oh, she is safe, Glenfernie!"

"I wanted her body safe--safe, warm, in my arms!"

"Spirit and spirit. Meet spirit with spirit!"

"No! I crave and hunger and am cold. Unless I warm myself--unless I warm myself--with anger and hatred!"

"I wish it were not so!"

"I had a friend.... I warm myself now in the hunt of a foe--in his look when he sees me!"

Gilian smote her hands together. "So Elspeth would have loved that! So the smothered God in you loves that!"

"It is the God in me that will punish him!"

"Is it--is it, Glenfernie?"

He made a wide gesture of impatience. "Cold--languid--pithless! You, Robin, Strickland, Alison Touris--"

Gilian looked at her basket of marigolds, pinks, and pansies. "That word death.... I bring these here, but Elspeth is with me everywhere! There is a riddle--there is a strange, huge mistake. She must solve it, she must make that port of all ports--and you and I must make it.... It is a hard, heroic, long adventure!"

"I speak of the pine-tree in the blast, and such as you would give me pansies! I speak of the eagle at the crag-top in the storm, and you offer butterflies!"

"Ah, then, go and kill her lover and the man who was your friend!"

Glenfernie rose from the step, in his face strong anger and denial. He stood, seeking for words, looking down upon the seated woman and her flowers. She met him with parted lips and a straight, fearless look.

"Will you take half the flowers, Glenfernie, and put them for Elspeth?"

"No. I cannot go there now!"

"I thought you would not. Now I am Elspeth. I love her. I would give her gladness--serve her. She says, 'Let him alone! Do you not know that his own weird will bring him into dark countries and light countries, and where he is to go? Is your own tree to be made thwart and misshapen, that his may be reminded that there is rightness of growth? He is a tree--he is not a stone, nor will he become a stone. There is a law a little larger than your fretfulness that will take care of him! I like Glenfernie better when he is not a busybody!'"

Alexander stared at her in anger. "Differences where I thought to find likeness--likenesses where I thought to find differences! He deceived me, fooled me, played upon me as upon a pipe; took my own--"

"Ha!" said Gilian. "So you are going a-hunting for more reasons than one?--Elspeth, Elspeth! come out of it!--for Glenfernie, after all, avenges himself!"

Alexander, looking like his father, spoke slowly, with laboring breath. "Had one asked me, I should have said that you above all might understand. But you, too, betray!" With a sweep of his arms abroad, a gesture abrupt and desolate, he turned. He quitted the sunny bare space, the kirkyard and the woman sitting with her basket of marigolds and pansies.

But two nights later he came to this place alone.

The moon was full. It hung like a wonder lantern above the hill and the kirk; it made the kirkyard cloth of silver. The yews stood unreal, or with a delicate, other reality. It was neither warm nor cold. The moving air neither struck nor caressed, but there breathed a sense of coming and going, unhurried and unperplexed, from far away to far away. The laird of Glenfernie crossed long grass to where, for a hundred years, had been laid the dead from White Farm. There was a mound bare to the sunlight thrown from the moon. He saw the flowers that Gilian had brought.

The flowers were colorless in the moonlight--and yet they could be, and were, clothed with a hue of anger from himself. They lay before him purple-crimson. They were withered, but suddenly they had sap, life, fullness--but a distasteful, reminding life, a life in opposition! He took them and threw them away.

Now the mound rested bare. He lay down beside it. He stretched his arms over it. "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!" But Elspeth did not answer--only the cool sunlight thrown back from the moon.