by John Buchan
It seemed to David as he turned from the door, where the shepherd stood with uplifted arm, that a benediction had been given, but not by him.
The moon had risen and the glen lay in a yellow light, with the high hills between Rood and Aller shrunk to mild ridges. The stream caught the glow, and its shallows were like silver chased in amber. The young man’s heart was full with the scene which he had left. Death was very near to men, jostling them at every corner, whispering in their ear at kirk and market, creeping between them and their firesides. Soon the shepherd of the Greenshiel would lie beside his wife; in a little, too, his own stout limbs would be a heap of dust. How small and frail seemed the life in that cottage, as contrasted with the rich pulsing world of the woods and hills and their serene continuance. But it was they that were the shadows in God’s sight. The immortal thing was the broken human heart that could say in its frailty that its Redeemer liveth. “Thou, Lord,” he repeated to himself, “in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure; they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed: but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.”
But as the road twined among the birches David’s mood became insensibly more pagan. He could not resist the joy of the young life that ran in his members, and which seemed to be quickened by the glen of his childhood. Death was the portion of all, but youth was still far from death. . . . The dimness and delicacy of the landscape, the lines of hill melting into a haze under the moon, went to his head like wine. It was a world transfigured and spell-laden. On his left the dark blotch which was Melanudrigill lay like a spider over the hillsides and the mouths of the glens, but all in front and to his right was kindly and golden. He had come back to his own country, and it held out its arms to him. “Salve, O venusta Sirmio,” he cried, and an owl answered.
The glen road was reached, but he did not turn towards Roodfoot. He had now no dread of the wood of Melanudrigill, but he had a notion to stand beside Rood water, where it flowed in a ferny meadow which had been his favourite fishing-ground. So he pushed beyond the path into a maze of bracken and presently was at the stream’s edge.
And then, as he guided his horse past a thicket of alders, he came full upon a little party of riders who had halted there.
There were three of them — troopers, they seemed, with buff caps and doublets and heavy cavalry swords, and besides their own scraggy horses there was a led beast. The three men were consulting when David stumbled on them, and at the sight of him they had sprung apart and laid hands on their swords. But a second glance had reassured them.
“Good e’en to you, friend,” said he who appeared to be the leader. “You travel late.”
It was not an encounter which David would have sought, for wandering soldiery had a bad name in the land. Something of this may have been in the other’s mind, for his next words were an explanation.
“You see three old soldiers of Leven’s,” he said, “on the way north after the late crowning mercy vouchsafed to us against the malignants. We be Angus men, and have the general’s leave to visit our homes. If you belong hereaways you can maybe help us with the road. Ken you a place of the name of Calidon?”
To their eyes David must have seemed a young farmer or a bonnet-laird late on the road from some errand of roystering or sweethearting.
“I lived here as a boy,” he said, “and I’m but now returned. Yet I think I could put you on your way to Calidon. The moon’s high.”
“It’s a braw moon,” said the second trooper, “and it lighted us fine down Aller, but the brawest moon will not discover you a dwelling in a muckle wood, if you kenna the road to it.”
The three had moved out from the shade of the alders and were now clear under the sky. Troopers, common troopers and shabby at that, riding weary, ill-conditioned beasts. The nag which the third led was a mere rickle of bones. And yet to David’s eye there was that about them which belied their apparent rank. They had spoken in the country way, but their tones were not those of countrymen. They had not the air of a gaunt Jock or a round-faced Tam from the plough-tail. All three were slim, and the hands which grasped the bridles were notably fine. They held themselves straight like courtiers, and in their voices lurked a note as of men accustomed to command. The leader was a dark man, with a weary thin face and great circles round his eyes; the second a tall fellow, with a tanned skin, a cast in his left eye, and a restless dare-devil look; the third, who seemed to be their groom, had so far not spoken, and had stood at the back with the led horse, but David had a glimpse above his ragged doublet of a neat small moustache and a delicate chin. “Leven has good blood in his ranks,” he thought, “for these three never came out of a but-and-ben.” Moreover, the ordinary trooper on his way home would not make Calidon a house of call.
He led them up to the glen road, intending to give them directions about their way, but there he found that his memory had betrayed him. He knew exactly in which nook of hill lay Calidon, but for the life of him he could not remember how the track ran to it.
“I’ll have to be your guide, sirs,” he told them. “I can take you to Calidon, but I cannot tell you how to get there.”
“We’re beholden to you, sir, but it’s a sore burden on your good-nature. Does your own road lie in that airt?”
The young man laughed. “The night is fine and I’m in no haste to be in bed. I’ll have you at Calidon door in half an hour.”
Presently he led them off the road across a patch of heather, forded Rood at a shallow, and entered a wood of birches. The going was bad, and the groom with the led horse had the worst of it. The troopers were humane men, for they seemed to have a curious care of their servant. It was “Canny now, James — there’s bog on the left,” or “Take tent of that howe;” and once or twice, when there was a difficult passage, one or the other would seize the bridle of the led horse till the groom had passed. David saw from the man’s face that he was grey with fatigue.
“Get you on my beast,” he said, “and I’ll hold the bridle. I can find my way better on foot. And do you others each take a led horse. The road we’re travelling is none so wide, and we’ll make better speed that way.”
The troopers docilely did as they were bidden, and the weary groom was hoisted on David’s grey gelding. The change seemed to ease him, and he lost his air of heavy preoccupation and let his eyes wander. The birch wood gave place to a bare hillside, where even the grey slipped among the screes and the four horses behind sprawled and slithered. They crossed a burn, surmounted another ridge, and entered a thick wood of oak, which David knew cloaked the environs of Calidon and which made dark travelling even in the strong moonlight. Great boulders were hidden in the moss, withered boughs hung low over the path, and now and then would come a patch of scrub so dense that it had to be laboriously circumvented. The groom on the grey was murmuring to himself, and to David’s amazement it was Latin. “Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram,” were the words he spoke.
David capped them.
“Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna,
Quale per incertam lunam . . .”
The man on the horse laughed, and David, looking up, had his first proper sight of his face. It was a long face, very pale, unshaven and dirty, but it was no face of a groom. The thin aquiline nose, the broad finely arched brow, were in themselves impressive, but the dominant feature was the eyes. They seemed to be grey — ardent, commanding, and yet brooding. David was so absorbed by this sudden vision that he tripped over a stone and almost pulled the horse down.
“I did not look,” said the rider, in a voice low-pitched and musical, “I did not look to find a scholar in these hills.”
“Nor did I know,” said David, “that Virgil was the common reading of Leven’s men.”
They had reached a field of wild pasture studded with little thorns, in the middle of which stood a great stone dovecot.
A burn falling in a deep ravine made a moat on one side of the tower of Calidon, which now rose white like marble in the moon. They crossed the ravine, not without trouble, and joined the main road from the glen, which ended in a high-arched gate round which clustered half a dozen huts.
At the sound of their arrival men ran out of the huts, and one seized the bridle of the leader. David and the groom had now fallen back, and it was the dark man who did the talking. These were strange troopers, for they sat their horses like princes, so that the hand laid on the bridle was promptly dropped.
“We would speak with the laird of Calidon,” the dark man said. “Stay, carry this ring to him. He will know what it means.” It seemed curious to David that the signet given to the man was furnished by the groom.
In five minutes the servant returned. “The laird waits on ye, sirs. I’ll tak’ the beasts, and your mails, if ye’ve ony. Through the muckle yett an it please ye.”
David turned to go. “I’ve brought you to Calidon,” he said, “and now I’ll take my leave.”
“No, no,” cried the dark man. “You’ll come in and drink a cup after the noble convoy you’ve given us. Nicholas Hawkshaw will be blithe to welcome you.”
David would have refused, for the hour was already late and he was many miles from Woodilee, had not the groom laid his hand on his arm. “Come,” he said. “I would see my friend, the student of Virgil, in another light than the moon,” and to his amazement the young man found that it was a request which he could not deny. There was a compelling power in that quiet face, and he was strangely loth to part from it.
The four dismounted, the three troopers staggering with stiff bones. The dark man’s limp did not change after the first steps, and David saw that he was crippled in the left leg. They passed through the gate into a courtyard, beyond which rose the square massif of the tower. In the low doorway a candle wavered, under a stone which bore the hawk in lure which was the badge of the house.
The three men bowed low to the candle, and David saw that it was held by a young girl.
CHAPTER III. GUESTS IN CALIDON TOWER
“Will you enter, sirs?” said the girl. She was clad in some dark homespun stuff with a bright-coloured screen thrown over her head and shoulders. She held the light well in front of her, so that David could not see her face. He would fain have taken his leave, for it seemed strange to be entering Calidon thus late at e’en in the company of strangers, but the hand of the groom on his arm restrained him. “You will drink a stirrup-cup, friend. The night is yet young and the moon is high.”
A steep stairway ran upward a yard or two from the doorway. Calidon was still a Border keep, where the ground-floor had once been used for byres and stables, and the inhabitants had dwelt in the upper stories. The girl moved ahead of them. “Will you be pleased to follow me, sirs? My uncle awaits you above.”
They found themselves in a huge chamber which filled the width of the tower, and, but for a passage and a further staircase, its length. A dozen candles, which seemed to have been lit in haste, showed that it was raftered with dark oak beams, and that the walls were naked stone where they were not covered with a coarse arras. The floor, of a great age, was bare wood blackened with time and use, and covered with a motley of sheepskins and deerskins. Two long oak tables and a great oak bench made the chief furniture, but there were a multitude of stools of the same heavy ancient make, and by a big open fireplace two ancient chairs of stamped Spanish leather. A handful of peats smouldered on the hearth, and the thin blue smoke curled upward to add grime to an immense coat of arms carved in stone and surmounted by a forest of deer horns and a trophy of targes and spears.
David, accustomed only to the low-ceiled rooms of the Edinburgh closes, stared in amazement at the size of the place and felt abashed. The Hawkshaws had made too great a sound in his boyhood’s world for him to enter their dwelling without a certain tremor of the blood. So absorbed was he in his surroundings that it was with a start that he saw the master of the house.
A man limped forward, gathered the leader of the party in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks.
“Will,” he said, “Will, my old comrade! It’s a kind wind that has blown you to Calidon this night. I havena clapped eyes on you these six year.”
The host was a man about middle life, with the shoulders of a bull and a massive shaggy head now in considerable disorder from the fact that a night-cap had just been removed from it. His clothes were of a comfortable undress, for the tags of his doublet and the points of his breeches were undone, and over all he wore an old plaid dressing-gown. He had been reading, for a pipe of tobacco marked his place in a folio, and David noted that it was Philemon Holland’s version of the Cyropædia. His eyes were blue and frosty, his cheeks ruddy, his beard an iron grey, and his voice as gusty as a hill wind. He limped heavily as he moved.
“Man, Will,” he cried, “it’s a whipping up of cripples when you and me forgather. The Germany wars have made lameters of the both of us. And who are the lads you’ve brought with you?”
“Just like myself, Nick, poor soldiers of Leven’s, on our way home to Angus.”
“Angus is it this time?” The host winked and then laughed boisterously.
“Angus it is, but their names and designations can wait till we have broken our fast. ‘Faith, we’ve as wolfish a hunger as ever you and me tholed in Thuringia. And I’ve brought in an honest man that guided us through your bogs and well deserves bite and sup.”
Nicholas Hawkshaw peered for a moment at David. “I cannot say I’m acquaint with the gentleman, but I’ve been that long away I’ve grown out of knowledge of my own countryside. But ye shallna lack for meat and drink, for when I got your token I bade Edom stir himself and make ready. There’s a good browst of yill, and plenty of French cordial and my father’s Canary sack. And there’s a mutton ham, and the best part of a pie — I wouldna say just what’s intil the pie, but at any rate there’s blackcocks and snipes and leverets, for I had the shooting of them. Oh, and there’s whatever more Edom can find in the house of Calidon. Here’s back your ring, Will. When I read the cognizance I had a notion that I was about to entertain greater folk—”
“Than your auld friend Will Rollo and two poor troopers of Leven’s. And yet we’re maybe angels unawares.” He took the ring and handed it to the groom, who with David stood a little back from the others, while Nicholas Hawkshaw’s eyes widened in a momentary surprise.
An ancient serving-man and a barefoot maid brought in the materials for supper, and the two troopers fell on the viands like famished crows. The groom ate little and drank less; though he was the slightest in build of the three travellers, he seemed the most hardened to the business. The lame man, who was called Will Rollo, was presently satisfied, and deep in reminiscences with his host, but the other required greater sustenance for his long wiry body, and soon reduced the pie to a fragment. He pressed morsels upon the groom — a wing of grouse, a giblet of hare — but the latter smiled and waved the food away. A friendly service, Leven’s, David thought, where a servant was thus tenderly considered.
“Yon were the brave days, when you and me served as ensigns of Meldrum’s in the Corpus Evangelicorum. And yon was the lad to follow, for there never was the marrow of the great Gustavus for putting smeddum into troops that had as many tongues and creeds as the Tower of Babel. But you and me were ower late on the scene. We never saw Breitenfeld — just the calamitous day of Lutzen, and the blacker day of Nordlingen, where Bernhard led us like sheep to the slaughter. That was the end of campaigning for you, Will. I mind leaving you on the ground for dead and kissing your cheek, the while I was near my own end with a musketoon ball in my ribs. Then I heard you were still in life and back in Scotland, but I was off with auld Wrangel to Pomerania, and had to keep my mind on my own affairs.”
So the talk went on, memories of leaguers and forced marches and pitched battles, punctuated with the names of Leslies and Hamiltons and Kerrs and Lumsdens and a hundred Scots merce
naries.—”I got my quietus a year syne serving with Torstensson and his Swedes — a pitiable small affair in Saxonia, where I had the misfortune to meet a round shot on the ricochet which cracked my shin-bone and has set me hirpling for the rest of my days. My Colonel was Sandy Leslie, a brother of Leslie of Balquhain, him that stuck Wallenstein at Eger, but a man of honester disposition and a good Protestant. He bade me go home, for I would never again be worth a soldier’s hire, and faith! when the chirurgeon had finished with my leg I was of the same opinion. — So home you find me, Will, roosting in the cauld rickle of stones that was my forbears’, while rumours of war blow like an east wind up the glens. I’m waiting for your news. I hear word that Davie Leslie . . .”
“Our news can wait, Nick. We’ve a gentleman here to whose ears this babble of war must sound outlandish.” It seemed to David that some secret intelligence passed between the two, and that a foot of one was pressed heavily on the other’s toes.
“I am a man of peace,” David said, for the talk had stirred his fancy, “but I too have word of a glorious victory in England won by the Covenant armies. If you have come straight from the south you can maybe tell me more.”
“There was a victory beyond doubt,” said the tall man with the squint, “and that is why we of Leven’s are permitted to go home. We have gotten our pay, whilk is an uncommon happening for the poor soldier in this land.”
“I have heard,” said David, “that the ranks of the Army of the Covenant fought for higher matters than filthy lucre.”
“For what, belike?”
“For the purity of their faith and the Crown honours of Christ.”
The other whistled gently through his teeth.
“No doubt. No doubt. There’s a braw sough of the Gospel in Leven’s ranks. But we must consider the loaves and fishes, good sir, as well as the preaching of the Word. Man canna live by bread alone, but he assuredly canna live without it, and to fill his belly he wants more than preaching. Lucre’s none so filthy if it be honestly earned, and goes to keep a roof over the wife and bairns. I have served in many lands with a kennin’ o’ queer folk, and, believe me, sir, the first thing a soldier thinks of is just his pay.”
