Foes Part 40

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Strickland, in the deep summer glen, saw before him the feather of smoke from Mother Binning's cot. The singing stream ran clearly, the sky arched blue above. The air held calm and fine, filled as it were with golden points. He met a white hen and her brood, he heard the slow drone of Mother Binning's wheel. She sat in the doorway, an old wise wife, active still.

"Eh, mon, and it's you!--Wish, and afttimes ye'll get!" She pushed her wheel aside. "I've had a feeling a' the day!"

Strickland leaned against her ash-tree. "It's high summer, Mother--one of the poised, blissful days."

"Aye. I've a feeling.... Hae ye ony news at the House?"

"Alice sings beautifully this summer. Jamie is marrying down in England--beauty and worth he says, and they say."

"Miss Alice doesna marry?"

"She's not the marrying kind, she says."

"Eh, then! She's bonny and gude, juist the same! Did ye come by White Farm?"

"Yes. Jarvis Barrow fails. He sits under his fir-tree, with his Bible beside him and his eyes on the hills. Littlefarm manages now for White Farm."

"Robin's sunny and keen. But he aye irked Jarvis with his profane sangs." She drew out the adjective with a humorous downward drag of her lip.

Strickland smiled. "The old man's softer now. You see that by the places at which his Bible opens."

"Oh aye! We're journeyers--rock and tree and Kelpie's Pool with the rest of us."

She seemed to catch her own speech and look at it. "That's a word I hae been wanting the morn!--The Kelpie's Pool, with the moor sae green and purple around it." She sat bent forward, her wrinkled hands in her lap, her eyes, rather wide, fixed upon the ash-tree.

"We have not heard from the laird," said Strickland, "this long time."

"The laird--now there! What ye want further comes when the mind strains and then waits! I see in one ring the day and Glenfernie and yonder water. Wherever the laird be, he thinks to-day of Scotland."

"I wish that he would think to returning," said Strickland. He had been leaning against the doorpost. Now he straightened himself. "I will go on as far as the pool."

Mother Binning loosed her hands. "Did ye have that thought when ye left hame?"

"No, I believe not."

"Gae on, then! The day's bonny, and the Lord's gude has a wide ring!"

Strickland walking on, left the stream and the glen head. Now he was upon the moor. It dipped and rose like a t.i.tan wave of a t.i.tan sea.

Its long, long unbroken crest, clean line against clean s.p.a.ce, brought a sense of quiet, distance, might. Here solitude was at home.

Now Strickland moved, and now he stood and watched the quiet. Turning at last a shoulder of the moor, he saw at some distance below him the pool, like a small mirror. He descended toward it, without noise over the springy earth.

A horse appeared between him and the water. Strickland felt a most involuntary startling and thrill--then half laughed to think that he had feared that he saw the water-steed, the kelpie. The horse was fastened to a stake that once had been the bole of an ancient willow.

It grazed around--somewhere would be a master.... Presently Strickland's eye found the latter--a man lying upon the moorside, just above the water. Again with a shock and thrill--though not like the first--it came to him who it was.

The laird of Glenfernie lay very still, his eyes upon the Kelpie's Pool. His old tutor, long his friend, quiet and stanch, gazed unseen.

When he had moved a few feet an outcropping of rock hid his form, but his eyes could still dwell upon the pool and the man its visitor. He turned to go away, then he stood still.

"What if he means a closer going yet?" Strickland settled back against the rock. "He would loose his horse first--he would not leave it fastened here. If he does that then I will go down to him."

Glenfernie lay still. There was no wind to-day. The reeds stood straight, the willow leaves slept, the water stayed like dusky gla.s.s.

The air, pure and light, hung at rest in the ether. Minutes went by, an hour. He might, Strickland thought, have lain there a long time. At last he sat up, rose, began to walk around the pool. He went around it thrice. Then again he sat down, his arms upon his knees, watching the dusk water. He did not go nor sit like one overwrought or frenzied or despairing. His great frame, his bearing, the air of him, had quietude, but not listlessness; there seemed at once calm and intensity as of a still center that had flung off the storm. Time flowed. Thought Strickland:

"He is as far as I am from death in that water. I'll cease to spy."

He moved away, moss and ling m.u.f.fling step, gained and dipped behind the shoulder of the moor. The horse grazed on. The laird sat still, his arms upon his knees, his head a little lifted, his eyes crossing the Kelpie's Pool to the wave-line against the sky.

Strickland went to where the moor path ran by the outermost trees of the glen head. Here he sat down beneath an oak and waited. Another hour pa.s.sed; then he heard the horse's hoofs. He rose and met Glenfernie home-returning.

"It is good to see you, Strickland!"

"I found you yonder by the Kelpie's Pool. Then I came here and waited."

"I have spent hours there.... They were not unhappy. They were not at all unhappy."

They moved together along the moor track, the horse following.

"I am glad and glad again that you have come--"

"I have been coming a good while. But there were preventions."

"We have heard nothing direct for almost a year."

"Then my letters did not reach you. I wrote, but knew that they might not. There is the smoke from Mother Binning's cot." He stood still to watch the mounting feather. "I remember when first I saw that, a six-year-old, climbing the glen with my father, carried on his shoulder when I was tired. I thought it was a hut in a fairy-tale....

So it is!"

To Strickland the remarkable thing lay in the lack of strain, the simplicity and fullness. Glenfernie was unfeignedly glad to see him, glad to see home shapes and colors. The blue feather among the trees had simply pleased him as it could not please a heart fastened to rage and sorrow. The stream of memories that it had beckoned--many others, it must be, besides that of the six-year-old's visit--seemed to have washed itself clear, to have disintegrated, dissolved venom and stinging. Strickland, pondering even while he talked, found the word he wanted: "Comprehensiveness.... He always tended to that."

Said Glenfernie, "I've had another birth, Strickland, and all things are the same and yet not the same." He gave it as an explanation, but then left it. They were going the moorland way to Glenfernie House. He was looking from side to side, recovering old landscape in sweep and in detail. Bit by bit, as they came to it, Strickland gave him the country news. At last there was the house before them, among the firs and oaks, topping the crag. They came into the wood at the base of the hill. The stream--the trees--above, the broken, ancient wall, the roofs of the new house that was not so new, the old, outstanding keep.

The whole rested, mellowed, lifted, still, against a serene and azure sky. Alexander stood and gazed.

"The keep. The pine still knots and clings there by the school-room.

Do you remember, Strickland, a day when you set me to read 'The Cranes of Ibycus'?"

"I remember."

"Life within life, and sky above sky!--I hear Bran!"

They mounted the hill. It seemed to run before them that the laird had come home. Bran and Davie and the men and maids and Alice, a bonny woman, and Mrs. Grizel, very little withered, exclaimed and ran.

Tibbie Ross was there that day, and Black Alan neighed from his stall.

Even the waving trees--even the flowers in the garden--Home, and its taste and fragrance--its dear, close emanations....

That evening at supper Mrs. Grizel made a remark. She leaned back in her chair and looked at Glenfernie. "I never thought you like your mother before! Oh aye! there's your father, too, and a kind of grand man he was, for all that he saw things dark. But will you look, Mr.