Witch Wood. Buchan John

man rose from his stool and revealed a huge gaunt frame, much bowed at the shoulders. He peered in the rushlight at the minister’s face.

      ‘Ye’re a young callant to be a minister. I was strong on your side, sir, when ye got the call, for your preachin’ was like a rushin’ michty wind. I mind I repeated the heids o’ your sermon to Mirren …. Ye’ve done me guid, sir—I think it’s maybe the young voice o’ ye. Ye wad get the word from Johnnie Dow. Man, it was kind to mak siccan haste. I wish—I wish ye had seen Mirren in life …. Pit up anither petition, afore ye gang—for a blessin’ on this stricken house and on an auld man who has his title sure in Christ but has an unco rebellious heart.’

      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, Ο 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 the 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