Chapter 35

The soldiers, having fruitlessly searched Black Hill, for the present set up quarters there, and searched the neighborhood. They gave a wide cast to that word. It seemed to include all this part of Scotland. Before long they appeared, not unforeseen, at Glenfernie.

The lieutenant was a wiry, wide-nostriled man, determined to please superiors and win promotion. He had now men at the Jardine Arms no less than men at Black Hill. Face to face with the laird of Glenfernie in the latter's hall, he explained his errand.

"Yes," said Glenfernie. "I saw you coming up the hill. Will you take wine?"

"To your health, sir!"

"To your health!"

The lieutenant set down the glass and wiped his lips. "I have orders, Mr. Jardine, which I may not disobey."

"Exactly so, Lieutenant."

"My duty, therefore, brings me in at your door--though of course I may say that you and your household are hardly under suspicion of harboring a proscribed rebel! A good Whig"--he bowed stiffly--"a volunteer serving with the Duke in the late trouble, and, last but not least, a personal enemy of the man we seek--"

"The catalogue is ample!" said Glenfernie. "But still, having your orders to make no exception, you must search my house. It is at your service. I will show you from room to room."

Lieutenant and soldiers and laird went through the place, high and low and up and down. "Perfunctory!" said the lieutenant twice. "But we must do as we are told!"

"Yes," said the laird. "This is my sister's garden. The small building there is an old school-room."

They met Alice walking in the garden, in the winter sunshine. Strickland, too, joined them here. Presentations over, the lieutenant again repeated his story.

"Perfunctory, of course, here--perfunctory! The only trace that we think we have we found in a glen near you. There is a cave there that I understand he used to haunt. We found ashes, still warm, where had been a fire. Pity is, the ground is so frozen no footstep shows!"

"You are making escape difficult," said Strickland.

"I flatter myself that we'll get him between here and the sea! I am going presently," said the lieutenant, "to a place called White Farm. But I am given to understand that there are good reasons--saving the lady's presence--why he'll find no shelter there."

"Over yonder is the old keep," said Glenfernie. "When that is passed, I think you will have seen everything."

They left Strickland and Alice and went to the keep. Their footsteps and those of the soldiers behind them rang upon the stone stairs.

"Above is the room," said the laird of Glenfernie, "where as a boy I used to play at alchemy. I built a furnace. I had an intention of making lead into gold. I keep old treasures there still, and it is still my dear old lair--though with a difference as I travel on, though with a difference, Lieutenant, as we travel on!"

They came into the room, quiet, filled with books and old apparatus, with a burning fire, with sunlight and shadow dappling floor and wall. "Well, he would hardly hide here!" said the lieutenant.

"Not by received canons," answered Glenfernie.

The lieutenant spoke to the soldiers. "Go about and look beneath and behind matters. There are no closets?"

"There are only these presses built against the stone." The laird opened them as he spoke. "You see--blank space!" He moved toward a corner. "This structure is my ancient furnace of which I spoke. I still keep it fuel-filled for firing." As he spoke he opened a sizable door.

The lieutenant, stooping, saw the piled wood. "I don't know much of alchemy," he said. "I've never had time to get around to those things. It's bringing out sleeping values isn't it?"

"Something like that." He shut the furnace door, and they stood watching the soldiers search the room. In no long time this stood a completed process.

"Perfunctory!" said again the lieutenant. "Now men, we'll to White Farm!"

"There is food and drink for them below, on this chilly day," said the laird, "and perhaps in the hall you'll drink another glass of wine?"

All went down the stairs and out of the keep. Another half-hour and the detail, lieutenant and men, mounted and rode away. Glenfernie and Strickland watched them down the winding road, clear of the hill, out upon the highway.

Alexander went back alone to the keep that, also, from its widened loopholes, might watch the searchers ride away. He mounted the stair; he came into his old room. Ian stood beside the table. The sizable furnace door hung open, the screen of heaped wood was disarranged.

"It was a good notion, that recess behind my old furnace!" said Glenfernie. "You took no harm beyond some cobwebs and ashes?"

"None, Señor Nobody," said Ian.

That day went by. The laird and Strickland talked together in low voices in the old school-room. Davie, too, appeared there once, and an old, trusted stableman. At sunset came Robin Greenlaw, and stayed an hour. The stars shone out, around drew a high, windy crystal night.

Mrs. Grizel went to bed. Alexander, with Alice and Strickland, sat by the fire in the hall. There was much that the laird wished to say that he said. They spoke in low voices, leaning toward the burning logs, the light playing over their faces, the light laughing upon old armor, crossed weapons, upon the walls. Alice, a bonny woman with sense and courage, sat beside Glenfernie. Strickland, from his corner, saw how much she looked like her mother; how much, to-night, Alexander looked like her.

They talked until late. They came to agreement, quiet, moved, but thorough. Glenfernie rose. He took Alice in his arms and kissed her thrice. Moisture was in the eyes of both.

"Sleep, dear, sleep! So we understand, things grow easy!"

"I think that you are right, and that is a long way to comfort," said Alice. "Good night, good night, Alexander!"

When she was gone the two men talked yet a little longer, over the dying fire. Then they, too, wished each other good night. Strickland went to his room, but Alexander left the house and crossed the moon-filled night to the keep. It was now he and Ian.

There was no strain. "Old Steadfast" and "Old Saracen," and a long pilgrimage together, and every difference granted, yet, in the background, a vast, an oceanic unity.... Ian rose from the settle. He and the laird of Glenfernie sat by the table and with pen and paper made a diagram of escape. They bent to the task in hand, and when it was done, and a few more words had been said, they turned to the pallets which Davie had spread on either side of the hearth. The moon and the low fire made a strange half-light in the room. The two lay still, addressed to sleep. They spoke and answered but once.

Said Ian: "I felt just then the waves of the sea!--The waves of the sea and the roads of France.... The waves and roads of the days and nights and months and years. I there and you here. There is an ether, doubtless, that links, but I don't tread it firmly.... Be sure I'll turn to you, call to you, often, over the long roads, from out of the trough of the waves! _Señor Nobody! Señor Nobody!_" He laughed, but with a catch of the breath. "Good night!"

"Good night, Old Saracen!" said Alexander.

Morn came. That day Glenfernie House heard still that all that region was searched. The day went by, short, gray, with flurries of snow. By afternoon it settled to a great, down-drifting pall of white. It was falling thick and fast when Alexander Jardine and Ian Rullock passed through the broken wall beyond the school-room. The pine branches were whitening, the narrow, rugged path ran a zigzag of white.

Strickland had parted from them at the wall, and yet Strickland seemed to be upon the path, following Glenfernie. Ian wore a dress of Strickland's, a hat and cloak that the countryside knew. He and Strickland were nearly of a height. Keeping silence and moving through a dimness of the descending day and the shaken veil of the snow, almost any chance-met neighbor would have said, in passing, "Good day, Mr. Strickland!"

The path led into the wood. Trees rose about them, phantoms in the snowstorm. The snow fell in large flakes, straight, undriven by wind. Footprints made transient shapes. The snow obliterated them as in the desert moving sand obliterated. Ian and Alexander, leaving the wood, took a way that led by field and moor to Littlefarm.

The earth seemed a Solitary, with no child nor lover of hers abroad. The day declined, the snow fell. Ian and Alexander moved on, hardly speaking. The outer landscape rolled dimmed, softened, withdrawn. The inner world moved among its own contours. The day flowed toward night, as the night would flow toward day.

They came to the foot of the moor that stretched between White Farm and Littlefarm.

"There is a woman standing by that tree," said Ian.

"Yes. It is Gilian."

They moved toward her. Tall, fair, wide-browed and gray-eyed, she leaned against the oak stem and seemed to be at home here, too. The wide falling snow, the mystic light and quietness, were hers for mantle. As they approached she stirred.

"Good day, Glenfernie!--Good day, Ian Rullock!--Glenfernie, you cannot go this way! Soldiers are at Littlefarm."

"Did Robin--"

"He got word to me an hour since. They are chance-fallen, the second time. They will get no news and soon be gone. He trusted me to give you warning. He says wait for him at the cot that was old Skene's. It stands empty and folk say that it is haunted and go round about." She left the tree and took the path with them. "It lies between us and White Farm. This snow is friendly. It covers marks--it keeps folk within-doors--nor does it mean to fall too long or too heavily."

They moved together through the falling snow.

It was a mile to old Skene's cot. They walked it almost in silence--upon Ian's part in silence. The snow fell; it covered their footprints. All outlines showed vague and looming. The three seemed three vital points moving in a world dissolving or a world forming.

The empty cot rose before them, the thatch whitened, the door-stone whitened. Glenfernie pushed the door. It opened; they found a clean, bare place, twilight now, still, with the falling snow without.

Gilian spoke. "I'll go on now to White Farm. Robin will come. In no long time you'll be upon the farther road.... Now I will say Fare you well!"

Alexander took her hands. "Farewell, Gilian!"

Gray eyes met gray eyes. "Be it short time or be it long time--soon home to Glenfernie, or long, long gone--farewell, and God bless you, Glenfernie!"

"And you, Gilian!"

She turned to Ian. "Ian Rullock--farewell, too, and God bless you, too!"

She was gone. They watched through the door her form moving amid falling snow. The veil between thickened; she vanished; there were only the white particles of the dissolving or the forming world. The two kept silence.

Twilight deepened, night came, the snow ceased to fall for a time, then began again, but less thickly. One hour went by, two, three. Then came Robin Greenlaw and Peter Lindsay, riding, and with them horses for the two who waited at Skene's cot.

Four men rode through the December night. At dawn they neared the sea. The snow fell no longer. When the purple bars came into the east they saw in the first light the huddled roofs of a small seaport. Beyond lay gray water, with shipping in the harbor.

At a crossroads the party divided. Robin Greenlaw and Peter Lindsay took a way that should lead them far aside from this port, and then with circuitousness home. Before they reached it they would separate, coming singly into their own dale, back to Black Hill, back to Littlefarm. The laird of Glenfernie and Littlefarm, dismounting, moving aside, talked together for a few moments. Ian gave Peter Lindsay a message for Mrs. Alison.... Good-bys were said. Greenlaw remounted; he and Peter Lindsay moved slowly from the two bound to the port. A dip of the earth presently hid them. Alexander and Ian were left in the gray dawn.

"Alexander, I know the safe house and the safe man and the safe ship. Why should you run further danger? Let us say good-by now!"

"No, not now."

"You have come to the edge of Scotland. Say farewell here, and danger saved, rather than on the water stairs in a little while--"

"No. I will go farther, Ian. There is Mackenzie's house, over there."

They rode through the winter dawn to the house at the edge of the port, where lived a quiet man and wife, under obligations to the Jardines. There visited them now the laird of Glenfernie and his secretary, Mr. Strickland.

The latter, it seemed, was not well--kept his room that day. The laird of Glenfernie went about, indeed, but never once went near the waterside.... And yet, at eve, the master of the _Seawing_, riding in the harbor, took the resolution to sail by cockcrow.

The sun went down with red and gold, in a winter splendor. Dark night followed, but, late, there rose a moon. Alexander and Ian, coming down to the harbor edge at a specified place, found there the waiting boat with two rowers. It hung before them on the just-lit water. "Now, Old Steadfast, farewell!" said Ian.

"I am going a little farther. Step in, man!"

The boat drove across, under the moon, to the _Seawing_. The two mounted the brig's side and, touching deck, found the captain, known to Ian, who had sailed before upon the _Seawing_, and known since yesterday to Glenfernie. The captain welcomed them, his only passengers, using not their own names, but others that had been chosen. In the cabin, under the swinging lantern, there followed a few words as to weather, ports, and sailing. The tide served, the _Seawing_ would be forth in an hour. The captain, work calling, left them in the small lighted place.

"The boat is waiting. Now, Old Steadfast--Señor Nobody--"

"Old Saracen, we used to say that we'd go one day to India--"

"Yes--"

"Well, let us go!"

"_Us_--"

"Why not?"

They stood with the table between them. Alexander's hands moved toward Ian's. They took hands; there followed a strong, a convulsive pressure.

"We sin in differing ways and at differing times," said Alexander, "but we all sin. And we all struggle with it and through it and onward! And there must be some kind of star upon our heights. Well, let us work toward it together, Old Saracen!"

They went out of the cabin and upon the deck. The boat that had brought them was gone. They saw it in the moonlight, half-way back to the quay. On the _Seawing_, sailors were lifting anchor. They stood and watched. The moon was paling; there came the scent of morning; far upon the shore a cock crew. The _Seawing's_ crew were making sail. Out and up went her pinions, filled with a steady and favoring wind. She thrilled; she moved; she left the harbor for a new voyage, fresh wonder of the eternal world.