Books: Heather and Snow
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George MacDonald >> Heather and Snow
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16 Produced by J. Ingram, C. Kirschner, D. Garcia and Distributed Proofreaders
HEATHER AND SNOW
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
CONTENTS
I. A RUNAWAY RACE
II. MOTHER AND SON
III. AT THE FOOT OF THE HORN
IV. DOG-STEENIE
V. COLONEL AND SERGEANT
VI. MAN-STEENIE
VII. CORBYKNOWE
VIII. DAVID AND HIS DAUGHTER
IX. AT CASTLE WEELSET
X. DAVID AND FRANCIS
XI. KIRSTY AND PHEMY
XII. THE EARTH-HOUSE
XIII. A VISIT FROM FRANCIS GORDON
XIV. STEENIE'S HOUSE
XV. PHEMY CRAIG
XVI. SHAM LOVE
XVII. A NOVEL ABDUCTION
XVIII. PHEMY'S CHAMPION
XIX. FRANCIS GORDON'S CHAMPION
XX. MUTUAL MINISTRATION
XXI. PHEMY YIELDS PLACE
XXII. THE HORN
XXIII. THE STORM AGAIN
XXIV. HOW KIRSTY FARED
XXV. KIRSTY'S DREAM
XXVI. HOW DAVID FARED
XXVII. HOW MARION FARED
XXVIII. HUSBAND AND WIFE
XXIX. DAVID, MARION, KIRSTY, SNOOTIE, AND WHAT WAS LEFT OF STEENIE
XXX. FROM SNOW TO FIRE
XXXI. KIRSTY SHOWS RESENTMENT
XXXII. IN THE WORKSHOP
XXXIII. A RACE WITH DEATH
XXXIV. BACK FROM THE GRAVE
XXXV. FRANCIS COMES TO HIMSELF
XXXVI. KIRSTY BESTIRS HERSELF
XXXVII. A GREAT GULF
XXXVIII. THE NEIGHBOURS
XXXIX. KIRSTY GIVES ADVICE
XL. MRS. GORDON
XLI. TWO HORSEWOMEN
XLII. THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER
XLIII. THE CORONATION
XLIV. KIRSTY'S TOCHER
XLV. KIRSTY'S SONG
CHAPTER I
A RUNAWAY RACE
Upon neighbouring stones, earth-fast, like two islands of an
archipelago, in an ocean of heather, sat a boy and a girl, the girl
knitting, or, as she would have called it, _weaving_ a stocking, and
the boy, his eyes fixed on her face, talking with an animation that
amounted almost to excitement. He had great fluency, and could have
talked just as fast in good English as in the dialect in which he was
now pouring out his ambitions--the broad Saxon of Aberdeen.
He was giving the girl to understand that he meant to be a soldier like
his father, and quite as good a one as he. But so little did he know of
himself or the world, that, with small genuine impulse to action, and
moved chiefly by the anticipated results of it, he saw success already
his, and a grateful country at his feet. His inspiration was so purely
ambition, that, even if, his mood unchanged, he were to achieve much
for his country, she could hardly owe him gratitude.
'I'll no hae the warl' lichtly (_make light of_) me!' he said.
'Mebbe the warl' winna tribble itsel aboot ye sae muckle as e'en to
lichtly ye!' returned his companion quietly.
'_Ye_ do naething ither!' retorted the boy, rising, and looking down on
her in displeasure. 'What for are ye aye girdin at me? A body canna lat
his thouchts gang, but ye're doon upo them, like doos upo corn!'
'I wadna be girdin at ye, Francie, but that I care ower muckle aboot ye
to lat ye think I haud the same opingon o' ye 'at ye hae o' yersel,'
answered the girl, who went on with her knitting as she spoke.
'Ye'll never believe a body!' he rejoined, and turned half away. 'I
canna think what gars me keep comin to see ye! Ye haena a guid word to
gie a body!'
'It's nane ye s' get frae me, the gait ye're gaein, Francie! Ye think a
heap ower muckle o' yersel. What ye expec, may some day a' come true,
but ye hae gien nobody a richt to expec it alang wi' ye, and I canna
think, gien ye war fair to yersel, ye wad coont yersel ane it was to be
expeckit o'!'
'I tauld ye sae, Kirsty! Ye never lay ony weicht upo what a body says!'
That depen's upo the body. Did ye never hear maister Craig p'int oot
the differ atween believin a body and believin _in_ a body, Francie?'
'No--and I dinna care.'
'I wudna like ye to gang awa thinking I misdoobtit yer word, Francie! I
believe onything ye tell me, as far as _I_ think ye ken, but maybe no
sae far as _ye_ think ye ken. I believe ye, but I confess I dinna
believe _in_ ye--yet. What hae ye ever dune to gie a body ony richt to
believe in ye? Ye're a guid rider, and a guid shot for a laddie, and ye
rin middlin fest--I canna say like a deer, for I reckon I cud lick ye
mysel at rinnin! But, efter and a',--'
'Wha's braggin noo, Kirsty?' cried the boy, with a touch of not
ill-humoured triumph.
'Me,' answered Kirsty; '--and I'll do what I brag o'!' she added,
throwing her stocking on the patch of green sward about the stone, and
starting to her feet with a laugh. 'Is't to be uphill or alang?'
They were near the foot of a hill to whose top went the heather, but
along whose base, between the heather and the bogland below, lay an
irregular belt of moss and grass, pretty clear of stones. The boy did
not seem eager to accept the challenge.
'There's nae guid in lickin a lassie!' he said with a shrug.
'There mith be guid in tryin to du't though--especially gien ye war
lickit at it!' returned the girl.
'What guid _can_ there be in a body bein lickit at onything?'
'The guid o' haein a body's pride ta'en doon a wee.'
'I'm no sae sure o' the guid o' that! It wud only hand ye ohn tried
(_from trying_) again.'
'Jist there's what yer pride dis to ye, Francie! Ye maun aye be first,
or ye'll no try! Ye'll never du naething for fear o' no bein able to
gang on believin ye cud du 't better nor ony ither body! Ye dinna want
to fin' oot 'at ye're naebody in particlar. It's a sair pity ye wunna
hae yer pride ta'en doon. Ye wud be a hantle better wantin aboot three
pairts o' 't.--Come, I'm ready for ye! Never min' 'at I'm a lassie:
naebody 'ill ken!'
'Ye hae nae sheen (_shoes_)!' objected the boy.
'Ye can put aff yer ain!'
'My feet's no sae hard as yours!'
'Weel, I'll put on mine. They're here, sic as they are. Ye see I want
them gangin throuw the heather wi' Steenie; that's some sair upo the
feet. Straucht up hill throuw the heather, and I'll put my sheen on!'
'I'm no sae guid uphill.'
'See there noo, Francie! Ye tak yersel for unco courteous, and
honourable, and generous, and k-nichtly, and a' that--oh, I ken a'
aboot it, and it's a' verra weel sae far as it gangs; but what the
better are ye for 't, whan, a' the time ye're despisin a body 'cause
she's but a quean, ye maun hae ilka advantage o' her, or ye winna gie
her a chance o' lickin ye!--Here! I'll put on my sheen, and rin ye
alang the laich grun'! My sheen's twice the weicht o' yours, and they
dinna fit me!'
The boy did not dare go on refusing: he feared what Kirsty would say
next. But he relished nothing at all in the challenge. It was not fit
for a man to run races with a girl: there were no laurels, nothing but
laughter to be won by victory over her! and in his heart he was not at
all sure of beating Kirsty: she had always beaten him when they were
children. Since then they had been at the parish school together, but
there public opinion kept the boys and girls to their own special
sports. Now Kirsty had left school, and Francis was going to the
grammar-school at the county-town. They were both about fifteen. All
the sense was on the side of the girl, and she had been doing her best
to make the boy practical like herself--hitherto without much success,
although he was by no means a bad sort of fellow. He had not yet passed
the stage--some appear never to pass it in this world--in which an
admirer feels himself in the same category with his hero. Many are
content with themselves because they side with those whose ways they do
not endeavour to follow. Such are most who call themselves Christians.
If men admired themselves only for what they did, their conceit would
be greatly moderated.
Kirsty put on her heavy tacketed (_hob-nailed_) shoes--much too large
for her, having been made for her brother--stood up erect, and putting
her elbows back, said,
'I'll gie ye the start o' me up to yon stane wi' the heather growin oot
o' the tap o' 't.'
'Na, na; I'll hae nane o' that!' answered Francis.
'Fairplay to a'!'
'Ye'd better tak it!'
'Aff wi' ye, or I winna rin at a'!' cried the boy,--and away they went.
Kirsty contrived that he should yet have a little the start of her--how
much from generosity, and how much from determination that there should
be nothing doubtful in the result, I cannot say--and for a good many
yards he kept it. But if the boy, who ran well, had looked back, he
might have seen that the girl was not doing her best--that she was in
fact restraining her speed. Presently she quickened her pace, and was
rapidly lessening the distance between them, when, becoming aware of
her approach, the boy quickened his, and for a time there was no change
in their relative position. Then again she quickened her pace--with an
ease which made her seem capable of going on to accelerate it
indefinitely--and was rapidly overtaking him. But as she drew near, she
saw he panted, not a little distressed; whereupon she assumed a greater
speed still, and passed him swiftly--nor once looked round or slackened
her pace until, having left him far behind, she put a shoulder of the
hill between them.
The moment she passed him, the boy flung himself on the ground and lay.
The girl had felt certain he would do so, and fancied she heard him
flop among the heather, but could not be sure, for, although not even
yet at her speed, her blood was making tunes in her head, and the wind
was blowing in and out of her ears with a pleasant but deafening
accompaniment. When she knew he could see her no longer, she stopped
likewise and threw herself down while she was determining whether she
should leave him quite, or walk back at her leisure, and let him see
how little she felt the run. She came to the conclusion that it would
be kinder to allow him to get over his discomfiture in private. She
rose, therefore, and went straight up the hill.
About half-way to the summit, she climbed a rock as if she were a goat,
and looked all round her. Then she uttered a shrill, peculiar cry, and
listened. No answer came. Getting down as easily as she had got up, she
walked along the side of the hill, making her way nearly parallel with
their late racecourse, passing considerably above the spot where her
defeated rival yet lay, and descending at length a little hollow not
far from where she and Francis had been sitting.
In this hollow, which was covered with short, sweet grass, stood a very
small hut, built of turf from the peat-moss below, and roofed with sods
on which the heather still stuck, if, indeed, some of it was not still
growing. So much was it, therefore, of the colour of the ground about
it, that it scarcely caught the eye. Its walls and its roof were so
thick that, small as it looked, it was much smaller inside; while
outside it could not have measured more than ten feet in length, eight
in width, and seven in height. Kirsty and her brother Steenie, not
without help from Francis Gordon, had built it for themselves two years
before. Their father knew nothing of the scheme until one day, proud of
their success, Steenie would have him see their handiwork; when he was
so much pleased with it that he made them a door, on which he put a
lock:--
'For though this be na the kin' o' place to draw crook-fingered
gentry,' he said, 'some gangrel body micht creep in and mak his bed
intil 't, and that lock 'ill be eneuch to haud him oot, I'm thinkin.'
He also cut for them a hole through the wall, and fitted it with a
window that opened and shut, which was more than could be said of every
window at the farmhouse.
Into this nest Kirsty went, and in it remained quiet until it began to
grow dark. She had hoped to find her brother waiting for her, but,
although disappointed, chose to continue there until Francis Gordon
should be well on his way to the castle, and then she crept out, and
ran to recover her stocking.
When she got home, she found Steenie engrossed in a young horse their
father had just bought. She would fain have mounted him at once, for
she would ride any kind of animal able to carry her; but, as he had
never yet been backed, her father would not permit her.
CHAPTER II
MOTHER AND SON
Francis lay for some time, thinking Kirsty sure to come back to him,
but half wishing she would not. He rose at length to see whether she
was on the way, but no one was in sight. At once the place was aghast
with loneliness, as it must indeed have looked to anyone not at peace
with solitude. Having sent several ringing shouts, but in vain, after
Kirsty, he turned, and, in the descending light of an autumn afternoon,
set out on the rather long walk to his home, which was the wearier that
he had nothing pleasant at hand to think about.
Passing the farm where Kirsty lived, about two miles brought him to an
ancient turreted house on the top of a low hill, where his mother sat
expecting him, ready to tyrannize over him as usual, and none the less
ready that he was going to leave her within a week.
'Where have you been all day, Frank?' she said.
'I have been a long walk,' he answered.
'You've been to Corbyknowe!' she returned. 'I know it by your eyes. I
know by the very colour of them you're going to deceive me. Now don't
tell me you haven't been there. I shall not believe you.'
'I haven't been near the place, mother,' said Francis; but as he said
it his face glowed with a heat that did not come from the fire. He was
not naturally an untruthful boy, and what he said was correct, for he
had passed the house half a mile away; but his words gave, and were
intended to give the impression that he had not been that day with any
of the people of Corbyknowe. His mother objected to his visiting the
farmer, but he knew instinctively she would have objected yet more to
his spending half the day with Kirsty, whom she never mentioned, and of
whom she scarcely recognized the existence. Little as she loved her
son, Mrs. Gordon would have scorned to suspect him of preferring the
society of such a girl to her own. In truth, however, there were very
few of his acquaintance whose company Francis would not have chosen
rather than his mother's--except indeed he was ill, when she was
generally very good to him.
'Well, this once I shall believe you,' she answered, 'and I am glad to
be able. It is a painful thought to me, Frank, that son of mine should
feel the smallest attraction to low company. I have told you twenty
times that the man was nothing but a private in your father's
regiment.'
'He was my father's friend!' answered the boy.
'He tells you so, I do not doubt,' returned his mother. 'He was not
likely to leave that mouldy old stone unturned.'
The mother sat, and the son stood before her, in a drawing-room whose
furniture of a hundred years old must once have looked very modern and
new-fangled under windows so narrow and high up, and within walls so
thick: without a fire it was always cold. The carpet was very dingy,
and the mirrors were much spotted; but the poverty of the room was the
respectable poverty of age: old furniture had become fashionable just
in time to save it from being metamorphosed by its mistress into a show
of gay meanness and costly ugliness. A good fire of mingled peat and
coal burned bright in the barrel-fronted steel grate, and shone in the
brass fender. The face of the boy continued to look very red in the
glow, but still its colour came more from within than from without: he
cherished the memory of his father, and did not love his mother more
than a little.
'He has told me a great deal more about my father than ever you did,
mother!' he answered.
'Well he may have!' she returned. 'Your father was not a young man when
I married him, and they had been together through I don't know how many
campaigns.'
'And you say he was not my father's friend!'
'Not his _friend_, Frank; his servant--what do they call them?--his
orderly, I dare say; certainly not his friend.'
'Any man may be another man's friend!'
'Not in the way you mean; not that his son should go and see him every
other day! A dog may be a man's good friend, and so was sergeant
Barclay your father's--very good friend that way, I don't doubt!'
'You said a moment ago he was but a private, and now you call him
sergeant Barclay!'
'Well, where's the difference?'
'To be made sergeant shows that he was not a common man. If he had
been, he would not have been set over others!'
'Of course he was then, and is now, a very respectable man. If he were
not I should never have let you go and see him at all. But you must
learn to behave like the gentleman you are, and that you never will
while you frequent the company of your inferiors. Your manners are
already almost ruined--fit for no place but a farmhouse! There you
are, standing on the side of your foot again!--Old Barclay, I dare say,
tells you no end of stories about your mother!'
'He always asks after you, mother, and then never mentions you more.'
She knew perfectly that the boy spoke the truth.
'Don't let me hear of your being there again before you go to school!'
she said definitively. 'By the time you come home next year I trust
your tastes will have improved. Go and make yourself tidy for dinner. A
soldier's son must before everything attend to his dress.'
Francis went to his room, feeling it absolutely impossible to have told
his mother that he had been with Kirsty Barclay, that he had run a race
with her, and that she had left him alone at the foot of the Horn. That
he could not be open with his mother, no one that knew her unreasoning
and stormy temper would have wondered; but the pitiful boy, who did not
like lying, actually congratulated himself that he had got through
without telling a downright falsehood. It would not have bettered
matters in the least had he disclosed to her the good advice Kirsty
gave him: she would only have been furious at the impudence of the
hussey in talking so to _her_ son.
CHAPTER III
AT THE FOOT OF THE HORN
The region was like a waste place in the troubled land of dreams--a
spot so waste that the dreamer struggles to rouse himself from his
dream, finding it too dreary to dream on. I have heard it likened to
'the ill place, wi' the fire oot;' but it did not so impress me when
first, after long desire, I saw it. There was nothing to suggest the
silence of once roaring flame, no half-molten rocks, no huge,
honey-combed scoriae, no depths within depths glooming mystery and
ancient horror. It was the more desolate that it moved no active sense
of dismay. What I saw was a wide stretch of damp-looking level, mostly
of undetermined or of low-toned colour, with here and there a black
spot, or, on the margin, the brighter green of a patch of some growing
crop. Flat and wide, the eye found it difficult to rest upon it and not
sweep hurriedly from border to border for lack of self-asserted object
on which to alight. It looked low, but indeed lay high; the bases of
the hills surrounding it were far above the sea. These hills, at this
season a ring of dull-brown high-heaved hummocks, appeared to make of
it a huge circular basin, miles in diameter, over the rim of which
peered the tops and peaks of mountains more distant. Up the side of the
Horn, which was the loftiest in the ring, ran a stone wall, in the
language of the country a dry-stane-dyke, of considerable size,
climbing to the very top--an ugly thing which the eye could not avoid.
There was nothing but the grouse to have rendered it worth the
proprietor's while to erect such a boundary to his neighbour's
property, plentiful as were the stones ready for that poorest use of
stones--division.
The farms that border the hollow, running each a little way up the side
of the basin, are, some of them at least, as well cultivated as any in
Scotland, but Winter claims there the paramountcy, and yields to Summer
so few of his rights that the place must look forbidding, if not
repulsive, to such as do not live in it. To love it, I think one must
have been born there. In the summer, it is true, it has the character
of _bracing_, but can be such, I imagine, only to those who are pretty
well braced already; the delicate of certain sorts, I think it must
soon brace with the bands of death.
The region is in constant danger of famine. If the snow come but a
little earlier than usual, the crops lie green under it, and no store
of meal can be laid up in the cottages. Then, if the snow lie deep, the
difficulty in conveying supplies of the poor fare which their hardihood
counts sufficient, will cause the dwellers there no little suffering.
Of course they are but few. A white cottage may be seen here and there
on the southerly slopes of the basin, but hardly one in its bottom.
It was now summer, and in a month or two the landscape would look more
cheerful; the heather that covered the hills would no longer be dry and
brown and in places black with fire, but a blaze of red purple, a rich
mantle of bloom. Even now, early in July, the sun had a little power. I
cannot say it would have been warm had there been the least motion in
the air, for seldom indeed could one there from the south grant that
the wind had no keen edge to it; but on this morning there was absolute
stillness, and although it was not easy for Kirsty to imagine any
summer air other than warm, yet the wind's absence had not a little to
do with the sense of luxurious life that now filled her heart. She sat
on her favourite grassy slope near the foot of the cone-shaped Horn,
looking over the level miles before her, and knitting away at a ribbed
stocking of dark blue whose toe she had nearly finished, glad in the
thought, not of rest from her labour, but of beginning the yet more
important fellow-stocking. She had no need to look close at her work to
keep the loops right; but she was so careful and precise that, if she
lived to be old and blind, she would knit better then than now. It was
to her the perfect glory of a summer day; and I imagine her delight in
the divine luxury greater than that of many a poet dwelling in softer
climes.
The spot where she sat was close by the turf-hut which I have already
described. At every shifting of a needle she would send a new glance
all over her world, a glance to remind one somehow of the sweep of a
broad ray of sunlight across earth and sea, when, on a morning of upper
wind, the broken clouds take endless liberties with shadow and shine.
What she saw I cannot tell; I know she saw far more than a stranger
would have seen, for she knew her home. His eyes would, I believe, have
been drawn chiefly to those intense spots of live white, opaque yet
brilliant, the heads of the cotton-grass here and there in thin patches
on the dark ground. For nearly the whole of the level was a peat-moss.
Miles and miles of peat, differing in quality and varying in depth, lay
between those hills, the only fuel almost of the region. In some spots
it was very wet, water lying beneath and all through its substance; in
others, dark spots, the sides of holes whence it had been dug, showed
where it was drier. His eyes would rest for a moment also on those
black spaces on the hills where the old heather had been burned that
its roots might shoot afresh, and feed the grouse with soft young
sprouts, their chief support: they looked now like neglected spots
where men cast stones and shards, but by and by would be covered with a
tenderer green than the rest of the hill-side. He would not see the
moorland birds that Kirsty saw; he would only hear their cries, with
now and then perhaps the bark of a sheep-dog.
My reader will probably conclude the prospect altogether uninteresting,
even ugly; but certainly Christina Barclay did not think it such. The
girl was more than well satisfied with the world-shell in which she
found herself; she was at the moment basking, both bodily and
spiritually, in a full sense of the world's bliss. Her soul was bathed
in its own content, calling none of its feelings to account. The sun,
the air, the wide expanse; the hill-tops' nearness to the heavens
which yet they could not invade; the little breaths which every now and
then awoke to assert their existence by immediately ceasing; doubtless
also the knowledge that her stocking was nearly done, that her father
and mother were but a mile or so away, that she knew where Steenie was,
and that a cry would bring him to her feet;--all these things bore each
a part in making Kirsty quiet with satisfaction. That there was, all
the time, a deeper cause of her peace, Kirsty knew well-the same that
is the root of life itself; and if it was not, at this moment or at
that, filled with conscious gratitude, her heart was yet like a bird
ever on the point of springing up to soar, and often soaring high
indeed. Whether it came of something special in her constitution that
happiness always made her quiet, as nothing but sorrow will make some,
I do not presume to say. I only know that, had her bliss changed
suddenly to sadness, Kirsty would have been quiet still. Whatever came
to Kirsty seemed right, for there it was!
She was now a girl of sixteen. The only sign she showed of interest in
her person, appeared in her hair and the covering of her neck. Of one
of the many middle shades of brown, with a rippling tendency to curl in
it, her hair was parted with nicety, and drawn back from her face into
a net of its own colour, while her neckerchief was of blue silk,
covering a very little white skin, but leaving bare a brown throat. She
wore a blue print wrapper, nowise differing from that of a peasant
woman, and a blue winsey petticoat, beyond which appeared her bare
feet, lovely in shape, and brown of hue. Her dress was nowise trim, and
suggested neither tidiness nor disorder. The hem of the petticoat was
in truth a little rent, but not more than might seem admissible where
the rough wear was considered to which the garment was necessarily
exposed: when a little worse it would receive the proper attention, and
be brought back to respectability! Kirsty grudged the time spent on her
garments. She looked down on them as the moon might on the clouds
around her. She made or mended them to wear them, not think about them.
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