The Short Stories of John Buchan (Complete Collection). Buchan John

must needs up and awa’ to the warld’s end on some daft-like ploy. But gang your ways and fare ye weel. My cousin Francie heard it, and he went north wi’ a white cockade in his bonnet and a sword at his side, singing ‘Charlie’s come hame.’ And Tarn Crichtoun o’ the Bourhopehead got a sough o’ it one simmer’s morning, and the last we heard o’ Tarn he was killed among the Frenchmen fechting like a fair deil. Once I heard a tinkler play a sprig of it on the pipes, and a’ the lads were wud to follow him. Gang your ways, for I am near the end o’ mine.” And the old wife shook with her coughing.

      So the man put up his belongings in a pack on his back and went whistling down the Great South Road.

      Whether or not this tale have a moral it is not for me to say. The King (who told it me) said that it had, and quoted a scrap of Latin, for he had been at Oxford in his youth before he fell heir to his kingdom. One may hear tunes from the Moor-Song, said he, in the thick of a storm on the scarp of a rough hill, in the low June weather, or in the sunset silence of a winter’s night. But let none, he added, pray to have the full music, for it will make him who hears it a footsore traveller in the ways o’ the world and a masterless man till death.

      COMEDY IN THE FULL MOON

       Table of Contents

      I

      “I dislike that man,” said Miss Phyllis, with energy.

      “I have liked others better,” said the Earl.

      There was silence for a little as they walked up the laurelled path, which wound by hazel thicket and fir-wood to the low ridges of moor.

      “I call him Charles Surface,” said Miss Phyllis again, with a meditative air. “I am no dabbler in the water-colours of character, but I think I could describe him.”

      “Try,” said the Earl.

      “Mr. Charles Eden,” began the girl, “is a man of talent. He has edged his way to fortune by dint of the proper enthusiasms and a seductive manner. He is a politician of repute and a lawyer of some practice, but his enemies say that like necessity he knows no law, and even his friends shrink from insisting upon his knowledge of politics. But he believes in all honest enthusiasms, temperance, land reform, and democracy with a capital D; he is, however, violently opposed to woman suffrage.”

      “Every man has his good points,” murmured the Earl.

      “You are interrupting me,” said Miss Phyllis, severely. “To continue, his wife was the daughter of a baronet of ancient family and scanty means. Her husband supplied the element which she missed in her father’s household, and to-day she is popular and her parties famous. Their house is commonly known as the Wilderness, because there the mixed multitude which came out of Egypt mingle with the chosen people. In character he is persuasive and good-natured; but then good-nature is really a vice which is called a virtue because it only annoys a man’s enemies.”

      “I am learning a great deal to-night,” said the man.

      “You are,” said Miss Phyllis. “But there, I have done. What I dislike in him is that one feels that he is the sort of man that has always lived in a house and is out of place anywhere but on a pavement.”

      “And you call this a sketch in watercolours?”

      “No, indeed. In oils,” said the girl, and they walked through a gate on to the short bent grass and the bouldered face of a hill. Something in the place seemed to strike her, for she dropped her voice and spoke simply.

      “You know I am town-bred, but I am not urban in nature. I must chatter daily, but every now and then I grow tired of myself, and I hate people like Charles Eden who remind me of my weakness.”

      “Life,” said the Earl, “it may be roughly divided into—But there, it is foolish to be splitting up life by hairs on such a night.”

      Now they stood on the ridge’s crest in the silver-grey light of a midsummer moon. Far up the long Gled valley they looked to the towering hills whence it springs; then to the left, where the sinuous Callowa wound its way beneath green and birk-clad mountains to the larger stream. In such a flood of brightness the far-distant peaks and shoulders stood out clear as day, but full of that hint of subtle and imperishable mystery with which the moon endows the great uplands in the height of summer. The air was still, save for the falling of streams and the twitter of nesting birds.

      The girl stared wide-eyed at the scene, and her breath came softly with utter admiration.

      “Oh, such a land!” she cried, “and I have never seen it before. Do you know I would give anything to explore these solitudes, and feel that I had made them mine. Will you take me with you?”

      “But these things are not for you, little woman,” he said. “You are too clever and smart and learned in the minutiae of human conduct. You would never learn their secret. You are too complex for simple, old-world life.”

      “Please don’t say that,” said Miss Phyllis, with pleading eyes. “Don’t think so hardly of me. I am not all for show.” Then with fresh wonder she looked over the wide landscape.

      “Do you know these places?” she asked.

      “I have wandered over them for ten years and more,” said the Earl, “and I am beginning to love them. In other ten, perhaps, I shall have gone some distance on the road to knowledge. The best things in life take time and labour to reach.”

      The girl made no answer. She had found a little knoll in the opposite glen, clothed in a tangle of fern and hazels, and she eagerly asked its name.

      “The folk here call it the Fairy Knowe,” he said. “There is a queer story about it. They say that if any two people at midsummer in the full moon walk from the east and west so as to meet at the top, they will find a third there, who will tell them all the future. The old men speak of it carefully, but none believe it.”

      “Oh, let us go and try,” said the girl, in glee. “It is quite early in the evening, and they will never miss us at home.”

      “But the others,” said he.

      “Oh, the others,” with a gesture of amusement. “We left Mr. Eden talking ideals to your mother, and the other men preparing for billiards. They won’t mind.”

      “But it’s more than half a mile, and you ‘ll be very tired.”

      “No, indeed,” said the girl, “I could walk to the top of the farthest hills to-night. I feel as light as a feather, and I do so want to know the future. It will be such a score to speak to my aunt with the prophetic accent of the things to be.”

      “Then come on,” said the Earl, and the two went off through the heather.

      II

      If you walk into the inn-kitchen at Callowa on a winter night, you will find it all but deserted, save for a chance traveller who is storm-stayed among the uncertain hills. Then men stay in their homes, for the place is little, and the dwellers in the remoter parts have no errand to town or village. But in the long nights of summer, when the moon is up and the hills dry underfoot, there are many folk down of an evening from the glens, and you may chance on men drinking a friendly glass with half a score of miles of journey before them. It is a cheerful scene—the wide room, with the twilight struggling with the new- lit lamp, the brown faces gathered around the table, and the rise and fall of the soft southern talk.

      On this night you might have chanced on a special gathering, for it was the evening of the fair-day in Gled-foot, and many shepherds from the moors were eating their suppers and making ready for the road. It was then that Jock Rorison of the Redswirehead—known to all the world as Lang Jock to distinguish him from his cousin little Jock of the Nick o’ the Hurlstanes—met