by John Buchan
These were all my facts — too few on which to spin the delicate web of history. But my imagination was kindled, and I set to work. If I were right, this glen had a virtue which had drawn to it many races. Little as the recorded history was, it was far more than the due of an inconsiderable howe of the hills. Rome had made it a halting-place and consecrated it to her gods; the Church had built a shrine in it; two famous clans had fought furiously for its sake. My first impression was justified, for it had been no common place. Some ancient aura had brooded over its greenness and compelled men’s souls.
Bit by bit from monkish Latin, from fragments of ballads, from cumbrous family histories, and from musty chronicles, I built up the shadow of a tale. Rome gave me nothing — the fog of years lay too thick over that greatest of mortal pages; but I hazarded a guess that the broken satyr’s head, found in some unknown Border earthwork and now in the Grange collection, had come from my glen. Perhaps the Melrose monks had found it and copied it in their gargoyles. But of the Christian shrine I had something to tell. The chapel seems to have had an ill reputation for a holy place. The chapter of Melrose in or about 1250 held an inquisition into the doings of a certain John of Fawn, who tended the shrine with unhallowed service. There were complaints of his successor, a monk who bore the name of Lapidarius; and the grand climax was reached in the fate of one Andrew de Faun, a priest, says the record, who had the unpleasing gift ‘diabolos convocandi’. He was hand in glove with Lord Soulis, whose castle of Hermitage lay some twenty miles over the hills. Of his iniquities it is recorded that the country folk grew weary, and one October night surprised him at the business. He confessed his sins under the pressure of boiling lead, was duly burned, and his ashes cast into Tweed to be borne to the cleansing sea.
To the monks succeeded the Barons, the first being the tragically fated house of Home. But side by side with the record of their moorland wars I found a ballad history. Fawn had caught the fancy of the wandering minstrel. The heroine of the ghastly ‘Riding of Etterick’ had eyes ‘grey as Fawn’. (The other reading ‘grey as a fawn’ is obvious nonsense.) The tryst for true love on Beltane’s E’en was the Fawn side, and it was in the Green Glen that young Brokyn found himself asleep on his return from Fairyland.
And when ye come to Fawn water, says the wise wife in ‘May Margaret’,
I bid ye lout fu’ low,
And say three prayers to Christes grace
Afore ye ride the flow.
In the lovely fragment, ‘The Thorn of Life’, there is a variant, not given by Child, which tells how on Midsummer morning the lady washed herself with dew ‘clear as dawn’ — an absurd literary phrase which spoils the poem. My emendation ‘Fawn’ is, I take it, certain. In the later riding ballads the name is still more frequent. The doomed raider in ‘Carlisle Town’ swears that Fawn will run red as blood ere his wrongs are forgotten. In ‘Castle Gay’ the dying Home craves, like King David, for a draught of Fawn water; and in ‘Lord Archibald’s Goodnight’ there is a strange line about ‘the holy wells of Fawn’. No doubt the line is corrupt, but the form of the corruption testifies to the spell of the Green Glen.
The Homes of Hardriding marched through disorder and violence to catastrophe. Never more than a hill clan, and kin to no powerful house, they persisted for three centuries by sheer audacity and pride. They held the Fawn glen and built a tower in it, but their real seat was Hardriding in the lower valley. The wave of Douglas aggression flowed round them, but they stoutly resisted, and it was only the power of the great Warden of the Marches that seized Fawnside for the Cauldshaw branch of his house. The battle in which Piers Home died by the hand of young Cauldshaw was fought in the Green Glen. Presently the Douglases were in trouble with the King, and a younger Piers, under a King’s commission, won back his lands and chased Cauldshaw into Northumberland. The Douglas clan was as often as not in treaty with the English Warden, while the Hardriding folk were vehemently Scottish, and, alone of their name, gave a good account of themselves at Flodden. The fortunes of the two houses see-sawed so long as lands were won and kept by the strong arm alone. By and by came the day of smooth things, when a parchment was more potent than the sword, and both Home and Douglas withered, like hill plants brought into a lowland garden.
It was all an unedifying tale of blood and treason, but in reading it I was struck by one curious fact. Every critical event in the fortunes of the two clans befell in the Green Glen. There the leaders died in battle or in duel, and there a shameless victor celebrated his mastery. It was, so to speak, the citadel, of which the possession was the proof of triumph. It can have had but little value in itself, for the tower by the burn was scarcely a fortalice, and was never seriously dwelled in. Indeed, it is referred to not as a castle but as a ‘bower’. When a Douglas defied a Home he summoned him to meet him by the ‘Bower o’ Fawn’. This same Bower was the centre of a pretty tale, when for once the blood-stained record emerges into the clear air of pastoral. The Fawn glen did not always pass by war; once it fell to the Douglases by marriage. Marjory of Hardriding, walking one evening by the stream, fell in with the young Douglas, sore wounded in a forest hunt. In the Bower she tended his wounds, and hid him from her fierce clan. Love ripened, and one July morn came the heir of Cauldshaw to Hardriding gates on an errand of peace. But the Home was surly, and the Douglas retired with a bitter denial and an arrow in his corselet. Thereupon Maid Marjory took the matter into her own hands, and rode over the hills to her lover. A gallant lady this, for, after a hurried wedding at the Kirk o’ Shaws, she returned with her man to the Fawn Bower to confront an angry father and six angrier brothers. She offered peace or war, but declared that, if war it should be, she herself would fight in the first rank of the Douglases. Whereupon, it is said, old Piers, struck with wonder and delight at the courage he had begotten, declared for peace, and the Green Glen was her dowry.
IV
The thing became an obsession with me, and I could not let this nook of history alone. Weary hours were spent in the search for Homes and Douglases. Why I wasted my time thus I cannot tell. I told myself it was part of the spell of the Green Glen. ‘The place was silent and aware,’ as Browning says. I could not think that the virtue had departed and that the romance of Fawn was a past tale. Now it had no visitants save a shepherd taking a short cut or a fisherman with a taste for moorland trout. But some day a horseman on a fateful errand would stir its waters, or the Bower witness a new pastoral. I told myself that the wise years might ordain a long interval, but sooner or later they would ring up the curtain on the play.
A needle in a haystack was a simple quest compared to mine. History, which loves to leave fringes and loose threads, had cut the record of Home and Douglas with her sharpest shears. The two families disappeared within the same decade. Cauldshaw had chosen the king’s side in the Covenant wars, and the head of the house, Sir Adam, had been a noted persecutor of the godly. He came to his end by a bullet of the Black Macmichael’s somewhere in the hills of Galloway. His son had fought in the Scots Brigade for the French king, and returned about 1710 to find an estate broken by fines and penalties. We see him last riding south with Mackintosh in the’Fifteen, but history does not tell us of his fate. He may have died with Derwentwater, or, more likely, he may have escaped and lain low till the hunt passed. Cauldshaw was forfeited and sold, and there was an end of it. Thirty years later I find a Douglas, a locksmith in the High Street of Edinburgh, who may have been his son, since he was gently born and yet clearly of no other known Douglas sept. After that the shears are at work. My note at the end of my researches was, ‘merged in the burgesses of Edinburgh’.
Hardriding showed a similar tale, save that the Homes stood for the Covenant. One of them, Piers or Patrick, swung in the Grassmarket, and was the subject of the eulogies of Wodrow and Patrick Walker. An odd type of saint, his godliness was proved chiefly by his ferocity against the King’s officers, for whom he would lie in wait behind a dyke with a musket. He died gallantly, declaiming the 23rd
Psalm. The Jacobite rising brought Hardriding round to the side of Cauldshaw. Home and Douglas rode south together, and the fate of the first at any rate is clear. He fell in the rout of Preston, charging with a mouthful of oaths and texts. He left landless sons who disappear into the mist, and the ancient name of Home of Hardriding died in the land. David Hume, the philosopher, in his cups used to claim kin with the house, but it is recorded that David’s friends did not take him seriously.
V
About that time I used to try to analyse the impression the Green Glen made upon me. I went to it often and in all weathers, but especially in the soft June days and the flaming twilights of October. At first I thought that the attraction was the peace of it, Wordsworth’s ‘sleep that is among the lonely hills’. Certainly it was very quiet and hallowed, with that brooding stillness which is a positive thing and not a mere absence of unrest. I have gone there, worried and distraught, and returned at ease with the world. Once, I remember, I came to it after fighting a forlorn bye-election in an English slum, with my brain fagged and dull and my nerves a torment. The Glen healed me, plunging me into the deeps of cool old-world shadows. But I soon discovered that the charm was not an opiate, but a stimulant. Its spell was the spell of life. It stirred the blood, comforting failure and nursing hope, but it did not lull to sleep. Once after a bad illness I went to Hardriding to rest, but I could not face the Glen. It only fevered a sick man. Its call was to action, and its ancient genius had no love for weaklings.
Often I tried to test it, to see if others could feel as I did. I was ridiculously unsuccessful. The sportsmen who frequented Hardriding, finding no grouse in the Glen, fought shy of it, and, if chance took them there, lamented the absence of heather. ‘Pretty place,’ one young man observed to me, ‘but no more Scotch than my hat. It might be Sussex. Where’s the brown heath and shaggy wood? What! There isn’t cover for a tomtit. It’s a nasty big slice out of Harry’s shooting to have that long bare place taking up room.’ It was too remote for ladies to picnic in, but one who penetrated as far called it ‘sweet’, and said it reminded her of Dartmoor. The people of the neighbourhood were no better. Keepers took the same view as the Hardriding sportsmen, and the farmer whose lease covered it spoke of it darkly as ‘Poverty Neuk’. ‘Food for neither man nor beast,’ he said. ‘Something might be done with phosphates, but I’ve no money to spend. It would make a grand dam if any town wanted a water-supply.’ Good business-like views, but no hint anywhere of the strangeness which to me had made it a kind of sanctuary.
There was one exception, the shepherd of the Nine Stane Rig. He was a young man, with a fiery red head and a taste for poetry. He would declaim Burns and Hogg with gusto, and was noted at ‘kirns’ and weddings for his robust rendering of songs like ‘When the Kye come Hame’, and ‘Robin Tamson’s Smiddy’. I used to accompany him sometimes on his rounds, and he spoke to me of the Green Glen.
‘It’s a bonny bit,’ he once said, waving his arm towards the Green Dod. ‘And there’s ae queer thing about it. Sheep ‘ll no bide in it. Ye may pit a hirsel in it at nicht, and every beast ‘ll be on the tap o’ the rig by the mornin’. How d’ye account for that? Mr Yellowlees says the feedin’s no guid, and that it wants phosphates. I dinna agree wi’ him. I’ve herdit a’ my days, and I never saw better feedin’ than by yon burn-side. I’ve no just fawthomed it yet, but I’ve an idea o’ my ain. I think the glen is an auld kirk-yaird. I mind when I herdit in Eskdalemuir there was a bit on the hill whaur Covenanters had been buried, and the sheep were aye sweir to gang near it. Some day I’m thinkin’ o’ gettin’ a spade and howkin’. I micht find something queer
VI
I came to regard the Green Glen as my own exclusive property, which shared with me a secret. It was a pleasant intimacy, and I had resigned myself to its limits, conscious that the curtain of the past was drawn too close to allow more than one little chink to be seen. Then one day Fate brought Linford across my path.
I had known him slightly for several years. I can see him now as I first knew him, a big solemn young man, too heavy for elegance, and an awkward weight for a horse. We first met one spring at Valescure, and a lonely fortnight established a kind of friendship between us. He was a modest being, full of halting sympathies and interests, for which he rarely found words. His family had been settled for two generations in Australia, sheep-farming in the good days when the big profits were made. His father had made a second fortune in a gold mine, and, disliking the land legislation of the country, had sold his farms and brought his boy to England. An undistinguished progress through a public school and Oxford had left him without a profession, and, his father having died, with no near relations, and a ridiculous amount of money. He should have been a soldier, but somehow had missed his chance. The man was in no way slack, but he gave me the impression of having no niche to fit into. He was very English in speech and manners, but he seemed to stand outside all the ordinary English occupations and look on. Not that he didn’t do most things well. He was a magnificent shot, a first-rate horseman, and the best man to sail a boat I have ever met. He read much, had travelled considerably, and had a keen interest in scientific geography. I thought he had found a job when he took a notion of exploring the Brahmaputra gorges, but the expedition fell through and his interest flagged. He belonged to many clubs, and had a few hundred acquaintances; but beyond myself I don’t think he had a friend.
He used to come to see me, and I tried to understand what puzzled him. For puzzled he was — not unhappy or disillusioned, but simply puzzled with life. Somehow he did not fit in with the world around him. I used to think it would have been better if he had never left Australia. There he had a ready-made environment; here in England he had to make his own, and he did not seem to have the knack of it. People liked him, and thought him, for all his stiffness, a good fellow. But he never accepted anybody or anything as his own; he was always the observant and sympathetic stranger. I began to realise that my friend, with all his advantages, was desperately homeless.
To myself, as I thought about him, I prescribed marriage. Vix ea nostra voco might have been his motto about most things, but in a wife he would find something his very own. The thing was obvious, but I saw also that he would be a hard fellow to marry. He was hopelessly shy and curiously unimpressionable. I do not remember that he ever spoke to me of any woman, and he avoided every chance of meeting them. I only once saw his tall figure at a dance, when he looked like nothing so much as Marius among the ruins of Carthage.
Hunting was his main hobby, and one January I found myself staying under the same roof with him in the Cottesmore country. He was, as I have said, a bold and fine rider, but he had to know his horse, and on this occasion our host mounted both of us. There was an ugly banked fence where he misjudged his animal’s powers, and came down in a heap on a hardish bit of ground. I thought his neck was broken, and prepared for the worst, as I helped three other white-faced men to get him clear. But it was only a slight concussion, a broken finger, and a dislocated shoulder. He had a bad night, but next day was little the worse for his fall, and, frost having set in, I spent most of the afternoon in his bedroom.
He wore a ring which I had often noticed, a little engraved carnelian in a heavy setting of Australian gold. In doctoring his hand it had been removed, and now lay on the dressing-table. We were talking idly of runs and spills, and, as we talked, I picked it up and examined it.
The stone was old and curious. There was no motto, and the carving seemed to be a heart transfixed by an arrow. I thought it the ordinary trumpery love token — Cupid and his darts — when I noticed something more. The heart was crowned, and the barb transfixing it was not an arrow but a spear.
The sight roused me to the liveliest interest. For the cognisance belonged to one house and one house alone. It was Douglas of Cauldshaw who had carried the family badge with this strange difference. Mary of Scots, it was said, had given him the spear, for to the last they had stood by that melancholy lady.
> ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.
‘What? The ring? It was my father’s. An ugly thing.’
I looked at it again. ‘It has an odd crest. Did you ever inquire about it?’
He said No. He knew little heraldry, and didn’t want to pretend to what didn’t belong to him. Then he corrected himself. He thought that the thing was a family relic, right enough. His father had got the stone in turn from his mother, and had had it reset. He thought, but he wasn’t sure, that it had been a long time in his grandmother’s family.
‘What was her name?’ I asked eagerly.
The answer was disappointing. ‘Brown,’ he said. ‘They had the Wooramanga place.’
I asked if they came from Scotland. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They were Yorkshire, I think. But wait a bit. I think — yes — I have heard my father say something about the Browns being Scotch — Brouns, you know.’
