LITMIR.BIZ

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the fiddler. He was a thoughtful man, with sympathies stronger than many who knew him were inclined to suspect, and he was deeply stirred by the obscure tragedy which had dragged on, unrealised by himself, ever since he had been called to Dalmain. He blamed himself. His sense of his own limitations, a healthy quality in most people, had been a stumbling-block to him; for he had taken the discouragements received in his timid efforts to know more of Phemie as proofs of how little he was fitted to deal with her. He envied people like Neil Gow; people whose masterful humanity carried them full sail into those waters where their fellow-men were drowning for want of a rope. The other half of his mind was amazed by the prank of a coincidence that had brought the Englishman here to meet the one man necessary to him in his quest.

      He hurried home, hoping that his guest would soon return; in the crowd at the farm he had noticed his presence, but lost him in the sudden scare which dispersed the party. He entered the little living-room to find him.

      ‘You look perturbed,’ said the Englishman. ‘Certainly you have no lack of incident in Dalmain. I’m truly glad it was a false alarm.’

      ‘I have much to say to you,’ began Laidlaw, sitting down.

      ‘Well, before you begin, let me have my turn. Perhaps you thought me sceptical when you spoke of Neil Gow, and I will not deny that I was. I was a fool – since I have heard him I know how great a fool. And now, sir, go on, and I will listen. My mind has been lightened of a little of its conceit.’

      His frankness struck some sensitive chord in Laidlaw. Perhaps the minister’s reserve was shaken by the sharp contact with realities tonight, perhaps stirred by sympathies he saw in others.

      ‘I am glad you came here,’ he stammered. ‘I should be glad to think – to hope – I have got some information for you, sir. Your cousin was lost sight of here; he reached Dalmain.’

      ‘You have got news of him?’

      ‘Something. Little enough; but I have heard a strange tale from Neil Gow.’

      ‘From Neil Gow?’

      Laidlaw nodded.

      ‘Margaret Moir died this evening, and a little laddie saw her through the window and came crying some havers to the Knowes’. Her sister was nearly wild, poor soul, and the bairn got a fright – but you were there, no doubt?’

      ‘I saw there was a disturbance, but I stayed where I was.’

      ‘The door was locked when I arrived,’ went on Laidlaw, ‘and Gow was with her. But he got her quiet and I went in-by. You’ll mind that I told you he was here the year of Culloden, playing on the old green? It was three nights before that dance that Jimmy Moir, who was the brother of these two lasses – as they were then – Margaret and Phemie, came to Dalmain with a wounded officer – likely the man you are seeking – and they hid themselves on the brae in a cave that is there, in amongst the broom. You can see it still; the bairns play at the mouth of it often enough, though I do not think they go far in. I have never been to it myself, but they say it runs a long way into the hillside. Moir got into the kirkton, without being seen, to tell his sisters, and Phemie and Margaret went out in the dark to bring them food and water; but there was no one in the place knew they were there, not even the beadle, that had been fighting himself, for he was lying ill in his house. The English soldiers were all about the country. The officer was so bad with his wound they could not get forward to the coast, and the day Neil came he was shouting and raving in a fever. You could hear him at the foot of the brae, Phemie says, just where the dancing was to be, and the lasses made sure the poor fellows would be discovered. They got short shrift in those times, you see, sir.’

      ‘But would anyone have given them up?’ asked the other.

      ‘Aye, well,’ said the minister, ‘whiles a man’s foes are they of his own household, and they said there were some in the kirkton that favoured King George. But Phemie was bold and went to seek Neil Gow. He was a young lad then, but she told him the truth and he said he would play till he had no arms left before anyone should hear aucht but his fiddle. When I spoke to you of that dance, not a couple of hours syne, little I thought how much it concerned you.’

      ‘Nor I, indeed.’

      ‘Margaret was a puir, timid thing and Jimmy was all the world to her. She stopped at home her lane, but Phemie went out and danced till the most o’ them were fou with whisky and Neil had played them off their legs. She waited till the last were gone. There was no crying from the broom when she went home. It was an awesome night for her, but it was the ruin of Margaret. She lay ill a long while, and when she rose from her bed her mind was never the same again.’

      ‘But the men – what became of them?’ asked the Englishman, getting impatient to reach what was, for him, the main point.

      ‘The days were long in June-month and Phemie had to wait for dark to go back. She found the place empty.’

      ‘And did no news ever come? Was nothing more heard?’

      ‘Nothing, sir. Nothing.’

      The other made a sharp exclamation of disappointment.

      ‘It has been a wild-goose chase after all,’ he said at last.

      The progress of Laidlaw’s detailed history had raised his expectations and he was half resentful at finding it end, for all the difference it would make to him, where it had begun. But he was too just a man to let the other see it.

      ‘I am greatly to blame!’ cried the minister, with sudden vehemence. ‘Here am I, a servant of men’s souls, and it was left for Neil Gow to loose Phemie Moir from her martyrdom while I went by on the other side! Aye! but I am an unprofitable servant!’ he exclaimed, seeing the other man’s astonished face; ‘that poor creature shut herself up with her sister and would thole nobody near them for fear some word should slip from the daft body and Moir be traced. Then, as time went by, her heart failed her and concealment grew in her mind like some poisonous weed, and she took the notion that, if word got out, the two of them would have to suffer for what they had done. Fear sat down with her to her meat and fear lay down with her in her bed. The years passed on, but she was too ignorant to ken that the world changes with them and old things go out of mind. People wonder that she’s not like other folk; they wouldna wonder if they knew! She was feared that Gow, who had stood friend to her, would let out what he kent, and fail her. Poor foolish wife to think such a thing of Gow! And the man had forgotten her till he saw her, and then she had need to tell him before he remembered! But when she heard his playing again she was fairly demented.’

      His face changed and he turned away. ‘Mea culpa,’ he faltered. He had little Latin, but he understood that much.

      ‘I fear the burden has shifted to you, my poor friend,’ said the Englishman gently.

      IT WAS ON the forenoon of the morrow that Laidlaw, the beadle and the Englishman stood up to their middles in the broom. The pods were black in the green mist of stems. About their feet rabbits had riddled the earth. The outcrop of rock had broken open in the hill-side, to be roofed with the turf of the overhanging brae and swallowed by the sea of broom and whin and the ash-coloured blur of seeding thistles. Interlacing whin-roots lurked about the burrows, traps for human steps. When they had climbed to their goal the three men stopped to get breath, and turned to look at the kirkton below them. Westward, through the creek cut by the burn to the Isla, they could see the indigo-blue Sidlaws with such lights as seem only to fall on Angus bathing their undulating shoulders.

      Each man carried a lantern, and when all were lighted they went crouching, one after another, into the cave. In a few paces they were able to stand up and look about them.

      Both Laidlaw and the Englishman had gone late to sleep on the preceding night, and the latter, lying thinking in the dark hours, turning over in his mind all he had heard, had come to a definite conclusion. He told himself that no man with a serious body-wound, exhausted by days of wandering and ill enough to be shouting in delirium, could escape on foot from a place in which he had once lain down. A man may go till he drops, but when he falls he will not rise again in circumstances like these, far less

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