Chapter 9

A DAUGHTER OF DEBATE.

They met under the arch of the gate, and Carmichael returned with the Carnegies, Kate making much of him and insisting that he should stay to luncheon.

"You are our first visitor, Mr. Carmichael, and the General says that we need not expect more than six, so we mean to be very kind to them. Do you live far from here?"

"Quite near--just two miles west. I happened to be passing; in fact, I 'm going down to the next parish, and I . . . I thought that I would like to call and . . . and bid you welcome;" for Carmichael had not yet learned the art of conversation, which stands mainly in touching details lightly and avoiding the letter I.

"It is very cruel of you to be so honest and dispel our flattering illusions"--Kate marvelled at his mendacity--"we supposed you had come 'anes errand'--I'm picking up Scotch--to call on your new neighbours. Does the high road pass the Lodge?"

"Oh no; the road is eight miles further; but the Drumtochty people take the near way through the woods; it's also much prettier. I hope you will not forbid us, General? two people a week is all the traffic."

"Forbid them--not I," said Carnegie, laughing. "A man is not born and bred in this parish without learning some sense. It would be a right of way case, and Drumtochty would follow me from court to court, and would never rest till they had gained or we were all ruined.

"Has it ever struck you, Mr. Carmichael, that one of the differences between a Highlander and a Scot is that each has got a pet enjoyment? With the one it's a feud, and with the other it's a lawsuit. A Scot dearly loves a 'ganging plea.'

"No, no; Tochty woods will be open so long as Kate and I have anything to say in the matter. The Glen and our people have not had the same politics, but we 've lived at peace, as neighbours ought to do, with never a lawsuit even to give a fillip to life."

"So you see, Mr. Carmichael," said Kate, "you may come and go at all times through our territory; but it would be bare courtesy to call at the Lodge for afternoon tea."

"Or tiffin," suggested the General; "and we can always offer curry, as you see. My daughter has a capital recipe she wiled out of an old Hindoo rascal that cooked for our mess. You really need not take it on that account," as Carmichael was doing his best in much misery; "it is only meant to keep old Indians in fair humour--not to be a test of good manners. By the way, Janet has been sounding your praises, how have you won her heart?"

"Oh, very easily--by having some drops of Highland blood in my veins; and so I am forgiven all my faults, and am credited with all sorts of excellences."

"Then the Highlanders are as clannish as ever," cried the General. "Scotland has changed so much in the last half century that the Highlanders might have become quite unsentimental and matter-of-fact.

"Lowland civilisation only crossed the Highland line after '45, and it will take more than a hundred and thirty years to recast a Celt. Scottish education and theology are only a veneer on him, and below he has all his old instincts.

"So far as I can make out, a Celt will rather fish than plough, and be a gamekeeper than a workman; but if he be free to follow his own way, a genuine Highlander would rather be a soldier than anything else under the sun."

"What better could a man be?" and Kate's eyes sparkled; "they must envy the old times when their fathers raided the Lowlands and came home with the booty. It's a pity everybody is so respectable now, don't you think?"

"Certainly the police are very meddlesome," and Carmichael now devoted himself to Kate, without pretence of including the General; "but the spirit is not dead. A Celt is the child of generations of cattle-stealers, and the raiding spirit is still in the blood. May I offer an anecdote?"

"Six, if you have got so many, and they are all about Highlanders," and Kate leant forward and nursed her knee, for they had gone into the library.

"Last week I was passing the cattle market in Edinburgh, and a big Highland drover stopped me, begging for a little money.

"'It iss from Lochaber I hef come with some beasties, and to-morrow I will be walking back all the way, and it iss this night I hef no bed. I wass considering that the gardens would be a good place for a night, but they are telling me that the police will be disturbing me.'

"He looked so simple and honest that I gave him half-a-crown and said that I was half a Highlander. I have three Gaelic sentences, and I reeled them off with my best accent.

"'Got forgive me,' he said, 'for thinking you to be a Sassenach body, and taking your money from you. You are a fery well-made man, and here iss your silver piece, and may you always hef one in your pocket.'"

"'But what about your bed?'

"'Tuts, tuts, that will be all right, for I hef maybe got some six or five notes of my own that were profit on the beasties; but it iss a pity not to be taking anything that iss handy when a body happens to be in the south.'"

"Capital." Kate laughed merrily, and her too rare laugh I used to think the gayest I ever heard. "It was the only opportunity left him of following his fathers. What a fine business it must have been, starting from Braemar one afternoon, a dozen men well armed, and getting down to Strathmore in the morning; then lying hid in some wood all day, and collecting a herd of fat cattle in the evening, and driving them up Glen Shee, not knowing when there might be a fight."

"Hard lines on the Scottish farmers, Kit, who might be very decent fellows, to lose their cattle or get a cut from a broadsword."

"Oh, they had plenty left; and seriously, dad, without joking, you know, what better could a Presbyterian Lowlander do than raise good beef for Highland gentlemen? Mr. Carmichael, I beg pardon; you seem so good a Celt, that I forgot you were not of our faith."

"We are not Catholics," the General explained, gravely, "although many of our blood have been, and my daughter was educated in a convent. We belong to the Episcopal Church of Scotland, and will go into Muirtown at a time, but mostly we shall attend the kirk of my old friend Dr. Davidson. Every man is entitled to his faith, and Miss Carnegie rather . . ."

"Forgot herself." Kate came to her father's relief. "She often does; but one thing Miss Carnegie remembers, and that is that General Carnegie likes his cheroot after tiffin. Do you smoke, Mr. Carmichael? Oh, I am allowed to stay, if you don't object, and have forgiven my rudeness."

"You make too much of a word, Miss Carnegie." Carmichael was not a man to take offence till his pride was roused. "Very likely my drover was a true blue Presbyterian, and his minister as genuine a cateran as himself.

"Years ago I made the acquaintance of an old Highland minister called MacTavish, and he sometimes stays with me on his way north in the spring. For thirty years he has started at the first sign of snow, and spent winter spoiling the good people of the south. Some years he has gone home with three hundred pounds."

"But how does he get the money?" inquired the General, "and what does he use it for?"

"He told me the history of his campaigns when he passed in March, and it might interest you; it's our modern raid, and although it's not so picturesque as a foray of the Macphersons, yet it has points, and shows the old spirit lives.

"'She wass a goot woman, Janet Cameron, oh yes, Mr. John, a fery exercised woman, and when she wass dying she will be saying peautiful things, and one day she will be speaking of a little field she had beside the church.

"'"What do you think I should be doing with that piece of ground," she will be saying, "for the end iss not far off, and it iss not earth I can be taking with me, oh no, nor cows."

"'"No, Janet," I said, "but it iss a nice field, and lies to the sun. It might be doing good after you are gone, if it wass not wasted on your mother's cousins twice removed in Inverness, who will be drinking every drop of it, and maybe going to the Moderate Kirk."

"'It wass not for two months or maybe six weeks she died, and I will be visiting her every second day. Her experiences were fery good, and I hef told them at sacraments in the north. The people in the south are free with their money, but it iss not the best of my stories that I can give them; they are too rich for their stomachs.

"'Janet will often be saying to me, "Mister Dugald, it iss a thankful woman that I ought to be, for though I lost my man in the big storm and two sons in the war, I hef had mercies, oh yes. There wass the Almighty and my cow, and between them I hef not wanted, oh no: they just did."

"'"Janet, you will be forgetting your field that iss lying next the manse, and the people will be thinking that it iss a glebe; but I am telling them that it iss Janet Cameron's, who iss a fery experienced woman, and hass nefer seen the inside of a Moderate Kirk since the Disruption."

"'Maybe you will be astonished, Mister John, but when Janet's will will be read that piece of ground wass left to the Free Kirk, which wass fery kind and mindful of Janet, and I made a sermon about her from the text of the "elect lady."

"'It wass a good field, but it needed a dyke and some drains, and it wass not our people that had the money. So I made another sermon on the text, "The boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it," and went down to the south. It wass not a dyke and some drains, but enough to build a byre and a stable I came back with. That wass in '55, and before '60 there will be a new manse with twelve rooms that iss good for letting to the English people. But it wass ten years the church needed, and a year for the porch to keep it warm, for I am not liking stoves, and will not hef one in Crianshalloch.

"'It iss wonderful how much money the bodies hef in Glasgow, and it iss good for them to be hearing sound doctrine at a time. There will be no Arminianism when I am preaching, and no joking; but maybe there will be some parables, oh yes, about the sheep coming in at the manse door for want of a fence, and the snow lying in the pulpit.'

"There is a cateran for you, and, mind you, a good fellow too. It's not greed sends him out, but sheer love of spoil. Would you like to see MacTavish next time he passes up with the cattle?" for Carmichael was emboldened by the reception of his sketch.

"Nothing we should like better, for the General and I want to know all about Scotland; but don't you think that those ministers have injured the Highlanders? Janet, you know, has such gloomy ideas about religion."

"There is no doubt, Miss Carnegie, that a load of Saxon theology has been landed on the Celt, and it has disfigured his religion. Sometimes I have felt that the Catholic of the west is a truer type of northern faith than the Presbyterian of Ross-shire."

"I am so glad to hear you say that," said Miss Carnegie, "for we had one or two west Catholics in the old regiment, and their superstitions were lovely. You remember, dad, the MacIvers."

"That was all well enough, Kit, but none of them could get the length of corporal; they were fearfully ignorant, and were reported at intervals for not keeping their accoutrements clean."

"That only showed how religious they were, did n't it, Mr. Carmichael? Hadn't the early Christians a rooted objection to the bath? I remember our Padre saying that in a lecture."

"There are a good many modern Christians of the same mind, Miss Carnegie, and I don't think our poor Highlanders are worse than Lowlanders; but Catholic or Protestant, they are all subject to the gloom. I cannot give the Gaelic word.

"What is that? Oh, a southerner would call it depression, and assign it to the liver, for he traces all trouble to that source. But there is no word for this mood in English, because it is not an English experience. My mother fell under it at times, and I saw the effect."

"Tell us, please, if all this description does not weary you?" and Kate shone on Carmichael, who would have talked on the Council of Nice or the rotation of crops to prolong his privileges.

"It comes on quite suddenly, and is quite a spiritual matter--a cloud which descends and envelops the soul. While it lasts a Highlander will not laugh nor sing; he will hardly speak, and he loses all hope about everything. One of our men has the gloom at a time, and then he believes that he is . . . damned. I am speaking theologically."

"The regiment must have been fond of theology, dad. Yes, we understand."

"Once he went out to the hill, and lay all night wrestling and agonising to be sure whether there was a God. You know he 's just a small farmer, and it seems to me splendid that such a man should give himself to the big problems of the universe. Do you know," and Carmichael turned to the General, who was smoking in great peace, "I believe that is the reason the Highlanders are such good fighting men. They fear God, and they don't fear any other person."

"I 'll vouch for one thing," said the veteran with emphasis; "our men put off the gloom, or whatever you call it, when they smelt powder; I never saw a panic in a Highland regiment in more than forty years' soldiering."

"What's the reason of the gloom? I believe that I have a touch of it myself at times--don't stare at me, dad, it's rude--just a thin mist, you know, but distinctly not indigestion. Is it a matter of race?"

"Of course, but that's no explanation." Carmichael had fallen into his debating society style. "I mean one has to go further back; all our habits are shaped by environment."

"One moment, please. I have always wanted to ask some clever person what environment meant. I asked Colonel MacLeod once, dad, and he said it was out of the new book on tactics, and he was thankful he had retired. Now Mr. Carmichael will make it plain," and Kate was very demure.

"It is rather stupid to use the word so much as people do now," and Carmichael glanced dubiously at Kate; "scientific men use it for circumstances."

"Is that all? then do pray say environment. Such a word introduces one into good society, and gives one the feeling of being well dressed; now about a Highlander's environment, is it his kilt you are thinking of, or his house, or what?"

"His country"--and Carmichael's tone had a slight note of resentment, as of one ruffled by this frivolity--"with its sea lochs, and glens, and mists. Any one who has been bred and reared at the foot of one of our mountains will have a different nature and religion from one living in Kent or Italy. He has a sense of reverence, and surely that is a good thing."

"Nothing more needed nowadays," the General broke in with much spirit; "it seems to me that people nowadays respect nobody, neither the Queen nor Almighty God. As for that man Brimstone, he will never cease till he has ruined the Empire. You need n't look at me, Kate, for Mr. . . . Carmichael must know this as well as any other sensible man.

"Why, sir," and now the General was on his feet, "I was told on good authority at the club last week by a newspaper man--a monstrously clever man--that Mr. Brimstone, when he is going down to the House of Commons to disestablish the Church, or the army, or something, will call in at a shop and order two hundred silk hats to be sent to his house. What do you call that, sir?"

"I should call it a deliberate--"

"_Jeu d'esprit_. Of course it is, dad," and Kate threw an appealing glance to Carmichael, who had sprung to his feet and was standing stiffly behind his chair, for he was a fierce Radical.

"Perhaps it was, lassie--those war correspondents used to be sad rascals--and, at any rate, politics are bad taste. Another cheroot, Mr. Carmichael? Oh, nonsense; you must tell my daughter more about your Highlanders. They are a loyal set, at any rate, and we all admire that."

"Yes, they are," and Carmichael unbent again, "and will stick by their side whether it be right or wrong. They 're something like a woman in their disposition."

"Indeed," said Kate, who did not think Carmichael had responded very courteously to her lead, "that is very interesting. They are, you mean, full of prejudices and notions."

"If a Highlander takes you into his friendship, you may say or do what you like, he will stand by you, and although his views are as different from yours as black from white, will swear he agrees with every one. If he 's not your friend, he can see no good in anything you do, although you be on his own side."

"In fact, he has very little judgment and no sense of justice; and I think you said," Kate went on sweetly, "his nature reminded you of a woman's?"

"You're sure that you like cheroots?" for the General did not wish this lad, Radical though he was, sacrificed on his first visit; "some men are afraid of the opium in them."

"Please do not interrupt Mr. Carmichael when he is making a capital comparison," and Kate held him to the point.

"What I intend is really a compliment," went on Carmichael, "and shows the superior fineness and sensitiveness of a woman's mind."

Kate indicated that she was sure that was his meaning, but waited for details.

"You see," with the spirit of one still fresh to the pulpit, "a man is slower, and goes by evidence; a woman is quicker, and goes by her instincts."

"Like the lower animals," suggested Kate, sweetly, "by scent, perhaps. Well?"

"You are twisting my words, Miss Carnegie." Carmichael did not like being bantered by this self-possessed young woman. "Let me put it this way. Would a jury of women be as impartial as a jury of men? Why, a bad-looking man would have no chance, for they would condemn him at once, not for what he did, but for what they imagined he was."

"Which would save a lot of time and rid society of some precious scoundrels," with vivid recollections of her own efforts in this direction. "Then you grant that women have some intelligence, although no sense of justice, which is a want?"

"Far brighter than men," said Carmichael, eagerly; "just consider the difference between a man's and a woman's speech. A man arranges and argues from beginning to end, and is the slave of connection. He will labour every idea to exhaustion before he allows it to escape, and then will give a solemn cough by way of punctuating with a full stop, before he goes on to his next point. Of course the audience look at their watches and make for the door."

"What would a woman do?" Kate inquired with much interest.

"A lady was speaking lately at Muirtown for an orphanage at Ballyskiddle, and described how Patsy was rescued from starvation, and greatly affected us. 'Patsy will never want bread again,' she concluded, and two bailies wept aloud.

"Then she went on, and it seemed to me a stroke of genius, 'Speaking about Patsy, has any lady present a black dress suitable for a widow woman?' Before we knew that we had left Patsy, the people were in a widow's home, and the bailies were again overcome. I mention them because it is supposed that a bailie is the most important human being in Scotland, and he feels it his duty not to yield to emotion.

"No, a woman speaker never sacrifices her capital; she carries it with her from England to France in her speech, and recognises no channel passage. In fact," and Carmichael plunged into new imagery, "a man's progress is after the manner of a mole, while a woman flits from branch to branch like a--"

"Squirrel--I know," came in Kate, getting tired.

"Bird, I meant. Why do you say squirrel?" and Carmichael looked suspiciously at Kate.

"Because it's such a careless, senseless, irresponsible little beast. Have you met many women, Mr. Carmichael? Really they are not all fools, as you have been trying to suggest for the last ten minutes."

"Highlanders are a safer subject of conversation than women," said the General, good-naturedly, as he bade Carmichael good-bye. "And you must tell us more about them next time you call, which I hope will be soon."

Carmichael halted twice on his way through the woods; once he stamped his foot and looked like a man whose pride had been ruffled; the other time he smiled to himself as one who was thinking of a future pleasure.

It was dusk as he crossed Lynedoch Bridge, and he looked down upon the pool below where the trout were leaping. Half an hour passed, and then he started off at high speed for Kilbogie Manse. "Please God if I am worthy," he was saying to himself; "but I fear she is too high above me every way."