Part 9

Thomson had never before attended a thoroughly Highland market; and the scene now presented was wholly new to him. The area it occupied was an irregular opening in the middle of the village, broken by ruts, and dung-hills, and heaps of stone. In front of the little turf-houses on either side, there was a row of booths, constructed mostly of poles and blankets, in which much whisky, and a few of the simpler articles of foreign merchandise, were sold. In the middle of the open space, there were carts and benches, laden with the rude manufactures of the country--Highland brogues and blankets; bowls and platters of beech; a species of horse and cattle harness, formed of the twisted twigs of birch; bundles of split fir, for lath and torches; and hair tackle and nets, for fishermen. Nearly seven thousand persons, male and female, thronged the area bustling and busy, and in continual motion, like the tides and eddies of two rivers at their confluence. There were countrywomen, with their shaggy little horses, laden with cheese and butter; Highlanders from the far hills, with droves of sheep and cattle; shoemakers and weavers, from the neighbouring villages, with bales of webs and wallets of shoes; farmers and fishermen, engaged as it chanced in buying or selling; bevies of bonny lasses, attired in their gayest; ploughmen and mechanics; drovers, butchers, and herd-boys. Whisky flowed abundantly, whether bargain-makers bought or sold, or friends met or parted; and, as the day wore later, the confusion and bustle of the crowd increased. A Highland tryst, even in the present age, rarely passes without witnessing a fray; and the Highlanders, seventy years ago, were of more combative dispositions than they are now; but Thomson, who had neither friend nor enemy among the thousands around him, neither quarreled himself, nor interfered in the quarrels of others. He merely stood and looked on, as a European would among the frays of one of the great fairs of Bagdad or Astracan.

He was passing through the crowd, towards evening, in front of one of the dingier cottages, when a sudden burst of oaths and exclamations rose from within, and the inmates came pouring out pell-mell at the door, to throttle and pummel one another, in inextricable confusion. A grey headed old man, of great apparent strength, who seemed by far the most formidable of the combatants, was engaged in desperate battle with two young fellows from the remote Highlands, while all the others were matched man to man. Thomson, whose residence in England had taught him very different notions of fair play and the ring, was on the eve of forgetting his caution and interfering; but the interference proved unnecessary. Ere he had stepped up to the combatants, the old man, with a vigour little lessened by age, had shaken off both his opponents; and, though they stood glaring at him like tiger cats, neither of them seemed in the least inclined to renew the attack.

"Twa mean pitiful kerns," exclaimed the old man, "to tak odds against ane auld enough to be their faither! an that, too, after burning my loof wi' the het airn! But I hae noited their twa heads thegither! Sic a trick!--to bid me stir up the fire, after they had heated the wrang end o' the poker! Deil but I hae a guid mind to gie them baith mair o't yet!"

Ere he could make good his threat, however, his daughter, a delicate-looking girl of nineteen, came rushing up to him through the crowd. "Father!" she exclaimed, "dearest father! let us away. For my sake, if not your own, let these wild men alone; they always carry knives; and, besides, you will bring all of their clan upon you that are at the tryst, and you will be murdered."

"No muckle danger frae that, Lillias," said the old man. "I hae little fear frae ony ane o' them; an' if they come by twasome, I hae my friends here to. The ill-deedy wratches, to blister a' my loof wi' the poker! But come awa, lassie; your advice is, I daresay, best after a'."

The old man quitted the place with his daughter; and, for the time, Thomson saw no more of him. As the night approached, the Highlanders became more noisy and turbulent; they drank, and disputed, and drove their very bargains at the dirk's point; and, as the salmon-fisher passed through the village for the last time, he could see the waving of bludgeons, and hear the formidable war-cry of one of the clans, with the equally formidable, "Hilloa! help for Cromarty!" echoing on every side of him. He kept coolly on his way, however, without waiting the result; and while yet several miles from the shores of Udoll, daylight had departed, and the moon at full had risen, red and huge in the frosty atmosphere, over the bleak hill of Nigg.

He had reached the burn of Newhall--a small stream, which, after winding for several miles between its double row of alders, and its thickets of gorse and hazel, falls into the upper part of the bay--and was cautiously picking his way, by the light of the moon, along a narrow pathway which winds among the bushes. There are few places in the country of worse repute among believers in the supernatural than the burn of Newhall; and its character seventy years ago was even worse than it is at present. Witch meetings without number have been held on its banks, and dead lights have been seen hovering over its deeper pools. Sportsmen have charged their fowling-pieces with silver when crossing it in the night-time; and I remember an old man who never approached it after dark without fixing a bayonet on the head of his staff. Thomson, however, was but little influenced by the beliefs of the period; and he was passing under the shadow of the alders, with more of this world than of the other in his thoughts, when the silence was suddenly broken by a burst of threats and exclamations, as if several men had fallen a-fighting, scarcely fifty yards away, without any preliminary quarrel; and, with the gruffer noises, there mingled the shrieks and entreaties of a female. Thomson grasped his stick and sprang forward. He reached an opening among the bushes, and saw in the imperfect light the old robust Lowlander of the previous fray attacked by two men armed with bludgeons, and defending himself manfully with his staff. The old man's daughter, who had clung round the knees of one of the ruffians, was already thrown to the ground and trampled under foot. An exclamation of wrath and horror burst from the high-spirited fisherman, as, rushing upon the fellow like a tiger from its jungle, he caught the stroke aimed at him on his stick, and with a sidelong blow on the temple, felled him to the ground. At the instant he fell, a gigantic Highlander leaped from among the bushes, and raising his huge arm, discharged a tremendous blow at the head of the fisherman, who, though taken unawares and at a disadvantage, succeeded, notwithstanding, in transferring it to his left shoulder, where it fell broken and weak. A desperate but brief combat ensued. The ferocity and ponderous strength of the Celt, found their more than match in the cool, vigilant skill, and leopard-like agility of the Lowland Scot; for the latter, after discharging a storm of blows on the head, face, and shoulders of the giant, until he staggered, at length struck his bludgeon out of his hand, and prostrated his whole huge length by dashing his stick end-long against his breast. At nearly the same moment the burly old farmer, who had grappled with his antagonist, had succeeded in flinging him, stunned and senseless, against the gnarled root of an alder; and the three ruffians--for the first had not yet recovered--lay stretched on the grass. Ere they could secure them, however, a shrill whistle was heard echoing from among the alders, scarcely a hundred yards away. "We had better get home," said Thomson to the old man, "ere these fellows are reinforced by their brother ruffians in the wood." And, supporting the maiden with his one hand, and grasping his stick with the other, he plunged among the bushes in the direction of the path, and, gaining it, passed onward, lightly and hurriedly, with his charge; the old man followed more heavily behind; and, in somewhat less than an hour after, they were all seated beside the hearth of the latter, in the farm-house of Meikle Farness.

It is now more than forty years since the last stone of the very foundation has disappeared; but the little grassy eminence on which the house stood may still be seen. There is a deep-wooded ravine behind, which, after winding through the table-land of the parish, like a huge crooked furrow--the bed evidently of some antediluvian stream--opens far below to the sea; an undulating tract of field and moor--with here and there a thicket of bushes, and here and there a heap of stone--spreads in front. When I last looked on the scene, 'twas in the evening of a pleasant day in June. One half the eminence was bathed in the red light of the setting sun--the other lay brown and dark in the shadow. A flock of sheep were scattered over the sunny side; the herd-boy sat on the top, solacing his leisure with a music famous in the pastoral history of Scotland, but now well-nigh exploded--that of the _stock_ and _horn_; and the air seemed filled with its echoes. I stood picturing to myself the appearance of the place, ere all the inmates of this evening, young and old, had gone to the churchyard, and left no successors behind them; and as I sighed over the vanity of human hopes, I could almost fancy I saw an apparition of the cottage rising on the knoll. I could see the dark turf walls; the little square windows, barred below and glazed above; the straw roof, embossed with moss and stone-crop; and, high overhead, the row of venerable elms, with their gnarled trunks and twisted branches that rose out of the garden wall. Fancy gives an interest to all her pictures--yes, even when the subject is but a humble cottage; and when we think of human enjoyment--of the pride of strength and the light of beauty--in connection with a few mouldering and nameless bones hidden deep from the sun, there is a sad poetry in the contrast which rarely fails to affect the heart. It is now two thousand years since Horace sung of the security of the lowly, and the unfluctuating nature of their enjoyments; and every year of the two thousand has been adding proof to proof that the poet, when he chose his theme, must have thrown aside his philosophy. But the inmates of the farm-house thought little this evening of coming misfortune--nor would it have been well if they had; their sorrow was neither heightened nor hastened by their joy.

Old William Stewart, the farmer, was one of a class well-nigh worn out in the southern Lowlands, even at this period; but which still comprised in the northern districts no inconsiderable portion of the people; and which must always obtain in countries only partially civilized and little amenable to the laws. Man is a fighting animal from very instinct; and his second nature, custom, mightily improves the propensity. A person naturally courageous, who has defended himself successfully in half-a-dozen different frays, will, very probably, begin the seventh himself; and there are few who have fought often and well for safety and the right, who have not at length learned to love fighting for its own sake. The old farmer had been a man of war from his youth. He had fought at fairs, and trysts, and weddings, and funerals; and, without one ill-natured or malignant element in his composition, had broken more heads than any two men in the country side. His late quarrel at the tryst, and the much more serious affair among the bushes, had arisen out of this disposition; for, though well-nigh in his sixtieth year, he was still as warlike in his habits as ever. Thomson sat fronting him beside the fire, admiring his muscular frame, huge limbs, and immense structure of bone. Age had grizzled his hair and furrowed his cheeks and forehead; but all the great strength, and well-nigh all the activity of his youth, it had left him still. His wife, a sharp-featured, little woman, seemed little interested in either the details of his adventure or his guest, whom he described as the "brave, hardy chield, wha had beaten twasome at the cudgel--the vera littlest o' them as big as himsel."

"Och, guidman," was her concluding remark, "ye aye stick to the auld trade, bad though it be; an' I'm feared that, or ye mend, ye maun be aulder yet. I'm sure ye ne'er made your ain money o't."

"Nane o' yer nonsense," rejoined the farmer--"bring butt the bottle an' your best cheese."

"The guidwife an' I dinna aye agree," continued the old man, turning to Thomson. "She's baith near-gaun an' new-fangled; an' I like aye to hae routh o' a' things, an' to live just as my faithers did afore me. Why sould I bother my head wi' _improvidments_, as they ca' them? The country's gane clean gite wi' pride, Thomson. Naething less sairs folk noo, forsooth, than carts wi' wheels to them; an' it's no a fortnight syne sin' little Sandy Martin, the trifling cat, jeered me for yoking my owsen to the plough by the tail. What ither did they get tails for?"

Thomson had not sufficiently studied the grand argument of design in this special instance, to hazard a reply.

"The times hae gane clean oot o' joint," continued the old man. "The law has come a' the length o' Cromarty noo; an' for breaking the head o' an impudent fallow, ane runs the risk o' being sent aff to the plantations. Faith, I wish oor Parliamenters had mair sense. What do they ken aboot us or oor country? Diel haet difference do they mak atween the shire o' Cromarty an' the shire o' Lunnon; just as if we could be as quiet beside the red-wud Hielanmen here, as they can be beside the queen. Na, na--naething like a guid cudgel;--little wad their law hae dune for me at the burn o' Newhall the nicht."

Thomson found the character of the old man quite a study in its way; and that of his wife--a very different, and, in the main, inferior sort of person, for she was mean-spirited and a niggard--quite a study too. But by far the most interesting inmate of the cottage was the old man's daughter--the child of a former marriage. She was a pale, delicate, blue-eyed girl, who, without possessing much positive beauty of feature, had that expression of mingled thought and tenderness which attracts more powerfully than beauty itself. She spoke but little--that little, however, was expressive of gratitude and kindness to the deliverer of her father--sentiments which, in the breast of a girl so gentle, so timid, so disposed to shrink from the roughnesses of active courage, and yet so conscious of her need of a protector, must have mingled with a feeling of admiration at finding, in the powerful champion of the recent fray, a modest, sensible young man, of manners nearly as quiet and unobtrusive as her own. She dreamed that night of Thomson, and her first thought, as she awakened next morning, was whether, as her father had urged, he was to be a frequent visitor at Meikle Farness. But an entire week passed away, and she saw no more of him.

He was sitting one evening in his cottage, poring over a book--a huge fire of brushwood was blazing against the earthen wall, filling the upper part of the single rude chamber of which the cottage consisted with a dense cloud of smoke, and glancing brightly on the few rude implements which occupied the lower--when the door suddenly opened, and the farmer of Meikle Farness entered, accompanied by his daughter.

"Ha! Allan, man," he said, extending his large hand and grasping that of the fisherman; "if you winna come an' see us, we maun just come an' see you. Lillias an' mysel were afraid the guidwife had frichtened you awa--for she's a near-gaun sort o' body, an' maybe no owre kind spoken; but ye maun just come an' see us whiles, an' no mind her. Except at counting-time, I never mind her mysel." Thomson accommodated his visitors with seats. "Yer life maun be a gay lonely ane here, in this eerie bit o' a glen," remarked the old man, after they had conversed for some time on indifferent subjects; "but I see ye dinna want company a'thegither, such as it is"--his eye glancing as he spoke over a set of deal shelves, occupied by some sixty or seventy volumes. "Lillias there has a liking for that kind o' company too, an' spends some days mair o' her time amang her books than the guidwife or mysel would wish."

Lillias blushed at the charge, and hung down her head; it gave, however, a new turn to the conversation; and Thomson was gratified to find that the quiet, gentle girl, who seemed so much interested in him, and whose gratitude to him, expressed in a language less equivocal than any spoken one, he felt to be so delicious a compliment, possessed a cultivated mind and a superior understanding. She had lived, under the roof of her father, in a little paradise of thoughts and imaginations, the spontaneous growth of her own mind; and, as she grew up to womanhood, she had recourse to the companionship of books--for in books only could she find thoughts and imaginations of a kindred character.

It is rarely that the female mind educates itself. The genius of the sex is rather fine than robust; it partakes rather of the delicacy of the myrtle, than the strength of the oak; and care and culture seem essential to its full development. Who ever heard of a female Burns or Bloomfield? And yet there have been instances, though rare, of women working their way from the lower levels of intellect to well-nigh the highest--not wholly unassisted, 'tis true--the age must be a cultivated one, and there must be opportunities of observation; but, if not wholly unassisted, with helps so slender, that the second order of masculine minds would find them wholly inefficient. There is a quickness of perception and facility of adaptation in the better class of female minds--an ability of catching the tone of whatever is good from the sounding of a single note, if I may so express myself, which we almost never meet with in the mind of man. Lillias was a favourable specimen of the better and more intellectual order of women; but she was yet very young, and the process of self-cultivation carrying on in her mind was still incomplete. And Thomson found that the charm of her society arose scarcely more from her partial knowledge, than from her partial ignorance. The following night saw him seated by her side in the farm-house of Meikle Farness; and scarcely a week passed during the winter in which he did not spend at least one evening in her company.

Who is it that has not experienced the charm of female conversation--that poetry of feeling which developes all of tenderness and all of imagination that lies hidden in our nature? When following the ordinary concerns of life, or engaged in its more active businesses, many of the better faculties of our minds seem overlaid; there is little of feeling and nothing of fancy; and those sympathies which should bind us to the good and fair of nature, lie repressed and inactive. But in the society of an intelligent and virtuous female, there is a charm that removes the pressure. Through the force of sympathy, we throw our intellects for the time into the female mould; our tastes assimilate to the tastes of our companion; our feelings keep pace with hers; our sensibilities become nicer, and our imaginations more expansive; and, though the powers of our mind may not much excel, in kind or degree, those of the great bulk of mankind, we are sensible that, for the time, we experience some of the feelings of genius. How many common men have not female society and the fervour of youthful passion sublimed into poets! I am convinced the Greeks displayed as much sound philosophy as good taste in representing their muses as beautiful women.

Thomson had formerly been but an admirer of the poets--he now became a poet; and, had his fate been a kindlier one, he might perhaps have attained a middle place among at least the minor professors of the incommunicable art. He was walking with Lillias one evening through the wooded ravine. It was early in April, and the day had combined the loveliest smiles of spring with the fiercer blasts of winter. There was snow in the hollows; but, where the sweeping sides of the dell reclined to the south, the violet and the primrose were opening to the sun. The drops of a recent shower were still hanging on the half-expanded buds, and the streamlet was yet red and turbid; but the sun, nigh at his setting, was streaming in golden glory along the field, and a lark was caroling high in the air, as if its day were but begun. Lillias pointed to the bird, diminished almost to a speck, but relieved by the red light against a minute cloudlet.

"Happy little creature!" she exclaimed--"does it not seem rather a thing of heaven than of earth? Does not its song frae the cloud mind you of the hymn heard by the shepherds? The blast is but just owre, an' a few minutes syne it lay cowering and chittering in its nest; but its sorrows are a' gane, an' its heart rejoices in the bonny blink, without ae thought o' the storm that has passed, or the night that comes on. Were you a poet, Allan, like any o' your two namesakes--he o' "The Seasons," or he o' the "Gentle Shepherd"--I would ask you for a song on that bonny burdie." Next time the friends met, Thomson produced the following verses:--

TO THE LARK.

Sweet minstrel of the April cloud! Dweller the flowers among! Would that my heart were formed like thine, And tun'd like thine my song! Not to the earth, like earth's low gifts, Thy soothing strain is given; It comes a voice from middle sky, A solace breathed from heaven.

Thine is the morn; and when the sun Sinks peaceful in the west, The mild light of departing day Purples thy happy breast. And, ah! though all beneath that sun Dire pains and sorrows dwell, Rarely they visit, short they stay, Where thou hast built thy cell.

When wild winds rave, and snows descend And dark clouds gather fast, And on the surf-encircled shore The seaman's bark is cast-- Long human grief survives the storm, But thou, thrice happy bird! No sooner has it passed away, Than, lo! thy voice is heard.

When ill is present, grief is thine; It flies, and thou art free; But, ah! can aught achieve for man What nature does for thee! Man grieves amid the bursting storms When smiles the calm he grieves; Nor cease his woes, nor sinks his plaint Till dust his dust receives.

As the latter month of spring came on, the fisherman again betook himself to his wears, and nearly a fortnight passed in which he saw none of the inmates of the farm-house. Nothing is so efficient as absence, whether self-imposed or the result of circumstances, in convincing a lover that he is truly such, and in teaching him how to estimate the strength of his attachment. Thomson had sat, night after night, beside Lillias Stewart, delighted with the delicacy of her taste and the originality and beauty of her ideas--delighted, too, to watch the still partially developed faculties of her mind, shooting forth and expanding into bud and blossom under the fostering influence of his own more matured powers. But the pleasure which arises from the interchange of idea and the contemplation of mental beauty, or the interest which every thinking mind must feel in marking the aspirations of a superior intellect towards its proper destiny, is not love; and it was only now that Thomson ascertained the true scope and nature of his feelings.