Castle Warlock ... Fourth edition

Front matter

PRESS NOTICES OF THE FIRST EDITION OF CASTLE WARLOCK. Standard. "Mr. Mac Donald himself, as well as the public, is to be congratulated on his having reverted to his earliest and best manner. He is never so good as when he tells a purely Scottisli story. . . . The Laird and his son Cosmo are as fine portraits of noble Scottish manhood as Mr. Mac Donald has ever achieved. Grizzie, the old servant, is perhaps the best bit of character drawing he has ever done. One would have to travel far to find rarer humour and sweeter pathos than are to be found in the chapters which describe," etc. Athenæum. "The descriptive portions of the story— the picture of the Ancient Castle of the AVarlocks, the" surroundings of the old captain's story and the haunted chamber, the wild night on which the wickeiisftb' Mergwain dies, and the other storm in which Cosmo is<iij<(?hearjy lost — are worthy of comparison with the Author's bast worian,^his way."

V&v* ' Academy. "Contains sbifsSJ^rirrable description, and not a little dialogue of a high order of excellence ; and one at least of the characters — the old servant — is equal to any creation of Dr. Mac Donald's we know." Morning Post. " One of the best books of the year." London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., LtP A HOMELY ROMANCE BY GEORGE MAC^JDONALD, LL.D. AUTHOR OF " MALCOLM," " THE MARQUIS OF LOSSIE," " ST. GEORGE AND ST. MICHAEL," ETC. FOURTH EDITION LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LT?. ( The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved. ) TO MRS. RUSSELL GURNEY: A broken tale of endless things, Take, lady : thou art not of those Who in what vale a fountain springs Would have its journey close. Countless beginnings, fair first parts, Leap to the light, and shining flow; All broken things, or toys or hearts, Are mended where they go.

Then down thy stream, with hope-filled sail, Float faithful, fearless on, loved friend; 'Tis God that has begun the tale. And does not mean to end. G. M. D. Bordighera, March, 1882. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGH I. Castle Warlock ... ... ... ... ... i II. The Kitchen ... ... ... ... ... 7 III. The Drawing-Room ... ... ... ... 14 IV. An Afternoon Sleep ... ... ... ... 20 V. The School ... ... ... ... ... 24 VI. Grannie's Cottage ... ... ... ... 28 VII. Dreams ... ... ... ■•■ ••• ••■ 34 VIII. Home ... ... ... ... ■■• — 44 IX. The Fellow-Students ... ... ... ■■• 48 X. A Morning ... .. ••• ■•• ■•■ 52 XI. Peter Simon ... ... ... ••• ■•• 55 XII. The Neav Schooling ... ... ... ... 59 XIII. Grannie's Ghost Story ... ... ... ... 64 XIV. The Storm Guest ... ... — — 71 XV. The Castle Inn ... ... ■•• •■• •■• 8° XVI.

Chapter I. Castle Warlock

A rough, wild glen it was, to which, far back in times unknown to its annals, the family of Warlock had given its name, sharing in return no small portion of its history, and a good deal of the character of its inhabitants. Glenwarlock lay in debatable land between Highlands and Lowlands ; most of its people spoke both Scotch and Gaelic, and there was in them a notable mingling of the chief characteristics of the widely differing Celt and Goth. The country produced more barley than wheat, more oats than barley, more heather than oats, more boulders than trees, and more snow than anything. It was a thinly peopled region, con sisting mostly of bare hills and partially cultivated glens, each glen with its small stream, on the banks of which grew here and there a silver birch, a mountain ash, or an alder tree ; but the trees were small, and there was nothing capable of giving much shade or shelter, except cliffy banks and big stones.

From many a spot you might look in all directions without seeing a sign of human or other habitation. Even then, however, you might, to be sure, most likely smell the perfume — to some nostrils it is nothing less than perfume — of a peat fire, although you might be long in finding out whence it came ; for the houses, if indeed the dwell ings could be called houses, were often so difficult to distinguish from the ground on which they were built, that except the smoke of fresh peats were coming pretty freely from the wide-mouthed chimney, it required an experienced eye to discover the human nest. The valleys that opened northward produced little ; there in some years the snow might be seen lying on patches of oats yet green, destined now only for fodder ; but where the valley ran east and west, and any tolerable ground looked to the south, things put on a different aspect.

There the graceful oats and the long-bearded barley would wave and rustle in the ripening wind ; in the small gardens would be found potatoes and peas in their season ; and there also would lurk for weeks a few cherished strawberries. Upon a natural terrace of such a slope to the south stood Castle Warlock. But it turned no smiling face to the region whence came the warmth and the growth. A more grim, repellent, unlovely building would be hard to find ; and yet, from its extreme simplicity, its utter indifference to its own looks, its repose, its weight, and its gray historical consciousness, no one who loved houses would have thought of calling it ugly. It was like the hard-featured face of a Scotch matron, with no end of story, of life, of character, holding a defensive if not defiant front to the world, but within warm, and tending carefully the fires of life.

Summer and winter, from the chimneys of that desolate looking house issued smoke ; for though the country was inclement, and the people that lived in it were poor, the great, sullen, almost unhappy-looking hills held clasped to their bare cold bosoms exposed to the bitterness of freezing winds and summer hail, the warmth of household centuries : their peat-bogs were the store closets and wine-cellars of the sun, for the hoarded elixir of physical life. The House of Glenwarlock, as it was also sometimes called, consisted of three massive, narrow, tall blocks of building, which showed little connection with each other beyond juxtaposition, two of them standing end to end, with but a few feet of space between, and the third at right angles to the two. In the two which stood end to end, hardly a window was to be seen on the side towards the valley ; while in the third, which, looking much of the same period, had all its upper part of later origin, were more windows, though none in the ground story.

Narrow as were these buildings, and four stones high, they had a solid, ponderous look, suggesting a thickness of the walls such as to leave little of a hollow within for the occupiers ; they were like the huge shell built for itself by a small mollusk. On the other side of them was a kind of court, completed by the stables and cow-houses, and towards this court were most of the windows, some of them small enough for a cottage. The court was now little better than a farmyard. In the block that stood angle-wise to the other two was the kitchen, the door of which opened immediately on the court ; and behind the kitchen was the milk-cellar, as they called the dairy, and places for household storage. A rough causeway ran along the foot of the walls, connecting the doors in the different blocks.

Of these the kitchen-door for the most part stood open. Some times the snow would be coming fast down the wide chimney, with little soft hisses in the fire, and the business of the house going on without a thought of closing it, even when you could not have seen from it across the yard for the falling flakes. But at the time when my story opens, the summer held the old house and the older hills in its wide embrace. The sun was pouring torrents of light and heat into the valley, and the slopes of it were covered with green. The bees were about, contenting themselves with flowers while the heather was getting ready its bloom for them. And a boy of fourteen was sitting in the little garden that lay like a dropped girdle about the feet of the grim old walls, parting the house from the slope where the corn stood now with the half-formed ear.

He sat on a big stone, which once must have had some part in the house or its defences, but which he had never known except as a seat. His back leaned against the hoary wall, and he was in truth meditating, although he did not look as if he were. He was already more than an incipient philosopher, though he could not yet have put into recognizable shape the things that were now passing through his mind. He thought how glad the bees would be when their crop of heather was ripe ; then he thought how they preferred the heather to the flowers ; then, that the one must taste nicer to them than the other ; and next awoke the question whether their taste of sweet was the same as his own. " For," thought he, " if their honey is sweet to them with the same sweetness with which it is sweet to me, then there is something in the make of the bee that's the same with the make of me ; and perhaps a man might some day, if he wanted, try the taste of being a bee all out."

But to see him, nobody would have thought he was doing anything but basking in the sun. The scents of the flowers about his feet came borne on the eddies of the air, and paid my lord many a visit in the ante-chamber, his brain; the windy noises of the insects, the watery noises of the pigeons, the family noises from the poultry-yard, the rushing song of the moun tain river, all visited him through the portals of his ears ; but at the moment the boy seemed lost, not in thought as was the fact, but in the fundamental enjoyment of mere existence. Neither, although broad summer was on the earth, and all the hill-tops and as much of the valleys as their shadows did not hide were bathed in sunlight, although the country was his native land, and he loved it with the love of his country's poets, was the con sciousness of the boy free from a certain trouble connected with, if not immediately arising from the landscape before him.

A Celt through many of his ancesters, and his mother in particular, his soul, full of undefined emotion, was aware of an ever-recurring impulse to song — ever as it came, checked and broken, and thrown back upon itself. There were a few books in the house, amongst them certain volumes of verse — a copy of Cowley, whose notable invocation of Light he had instinctively blundered upon, Milton's poems, the translated Ossian, Thomson's Seasons, with a few more ; and from the reading of these, among other results was this — that, in the midst of his enjoyment of the world around him, he sighed after a lovelier nature than he beheld. Then there were in the house one or two old engravings of forest, mountain, and ocean scenery, on which he looked with a strange, inexplicable reverence ; and sometimes he would wake weeping from a dream of such or yet grander mountains, such trees, or such endless wilds of water.

Once with his waking eyes he saw a mist, afar between the hills that ramparted the horizon, grow rosy in the upshot rays ofthe sunken sun, and his heart filled with the joy of a discovered loveliness. Around him, it was true, the waters rushed well from their hills, but their banks had little beauty. Not merely did their lack of trees distress him, but the nature of their channels : most of them, instead of rushing through rocks, as he would have had them, cut their way only through beds of rough gravel, and their bare surroundings were desolate without grandeur — almost mean to eyes that were not yet able to see the soul of them ; nor had he yet learned to admire the lucent brown of the bog-waters. There seemed to be in the boy a strain of some race nursed in a richer home, while yet all the time the frozen regions drew his fancy more than the azure glories of the south.

His name was Cosmo, a name brought from Italy by one of the line who had lent for hire his arm and sword and fought for strangers. Not a few from the younger branches of the family had followed the same evil profession and taken foreign pay — chiefly from poverty and prejudice combined, but not a little in more than one case from the inborn love of fighting that seems to characterize the Celt. The last soldier of them had served the East India Company both by sea and land. Tradition plainly delivered that he had yet more served himself. For several generations the heads of the house had been the chief cultivators of their own property, drawing from it what to many farmers nowadays would seem but a scanty return. The estate had dwindled to the twentieth part of what it had been a few centuries before, though even then it could never have made its proprietor rich m anything but the devotion of his retainers.

Finding it too hot between sun and wall, Cosmo rose, left th-e garden, and crossing a certain heave of grass, came upon one of the hitherto unfailing delights in his lot— a preacher whose voice, inarticulate it is true, had, ever since he was born, been at most times louder in his ear than any other. It was a mountain stream, which, unlike most of the rest, ran through a channel of rock, and went roaring, rushing, sometimes thundering, with an arrow-like, foamy swiftness, down to the river in the glen below. The rocks were dark, and the foam shone brilliant against them. From the hill-top came the stream, sloping steep from far. When you looked up, it seemed to come flowing from the horizon itself, and when you looked down, it seemed suddenly to find it could no more return to the regions it had left, and shoot headlong in dismay to the abyss.

There was not much water in it now, though plenty to make a joyous white rush through the deep-worn brown of the rock, but in the autumn and spring it came down gloriously, dark and fierce, as if it sought the very centre, wild with greed after an absolute rest. The boy stood, and gazed, as was his custom. Always when he grew weary, or when the things about him put on a too ordinary look, he would seek this endless water. Let the aspect of this be what it might, it seemed still inspired and sent forth by some essential mystery, some endless possibility. There was in him an unusual combination of the power to read the hieroglyphic aspect of things, and the scientific nature that bows before fact. He knew that the stream was neither in its first nor its second stage when it rose from the earth to rush to the river, that it was pumped from the great ocean up to the reservoirs of the sky, and thence descended in snows and rains to wander down and up through the veins of the earth ; but until now his growing knowledge had never assailed his feeling of its mystery.

The poetic nature was not merely predominant in him, but dominant, sending itself a pervading spirit through the science that else would have stifled him. For there is nothing in the outer fact by which man can live, any more than by bread ; it needs the poetic eye, illuminating with polarized ray as it pierces, to reveal in the heart of fact its life, that is, its eternal relations. But now he stood gazing in a mood different from any that had come to him before, for he had discovered something very sad about the stream. He had long vaguely known that what in the stream, from earliest childhood, drew him with an unfailing power, was the sense, for a long time an ever-growing one, of its mystery — the form the infinite first takes to the simplest and liveliest hearts. He loved it because it was always flowing, because it could not stop : whence it came was unknown to him, and he did not care to know.

When he learned that it issued from the dark hard earth, the mystery had only grown. He imagined a wondrous cavity below, in black rock, where the water gathered and gathered, nobody could think how — not coming from anywhere else, but beginning just there. When, later on, he had to shift his idea of its source, and think of it as in the great sky, the marvel was no less marvellous, and more lovely; it bound closer the gentle earth and the awful withdrawing heavens. The sky was a region of endless hopes and ever re current despairs ; that the beloved earthly thing should rise there, gave him one homely fact concerning the unknown and appalling. But from the sky he was sent back to the earth in yet farther pursuit ; for whence came the rain, as his books told him, but from the sea ? The sea he had read of, though never yet beheld, and he knew it magnificent ; gladly, as he thought with himself under the wall, would he have hailed it an intermediate betwixt the sky and the earth, with the sky coming first, but, alas, the sea was before the sky in the order of the stream's genesis 1 And then, worse and worse ! how was the ocean fed but from the torrent ?

How was the sky fed but from the ocean ? How was the dark fountain fed but from the sky ? How was the torrent fed but from the fountain ? As he sat in the hot garden, leaning against the old gray castle, the nest of his family for countless generations, with the scent of the flowers in his nostrils, and the sound of the bees in his ears, he became aware that he had lost the stream of his childhood — the mysterious, infinite idea of endless, inexplicable, original birth, of outflowing because of es sential existence within. There was no production any more, nothing but the merest rushing around, like the ring-sea of Saturn, in a never ending circle of formal change ! Like a great dish, the mighty ocean was skimmed in particles invisible ; these were gathered aloft into sponges all water and no sponge ; and thence through many an airy, many an earthly channel, deflowered of its mystery, his ancient, self-producing fountain to a holy, merry river, was fed — only fed I It was but a cistern after all !

He grew very sad, and well he might. Moved by the spring eternal in himselt, whereof the love in his heart was a river-shape, he turned away from the deathened stream, and without knowing why, sought the humanity in the castle.

Chapter II. The Kitchen

He entered the wide kitchen, paved with large slabs of slate. One brilliant gray-blue spot of sunlight lay on the floor. It came through a small window to the east, and made the peat-fire glow red in contrast Over the fire, from a great chain, hung a three-legged pot, in which something was slowly cooking. Between the fire and the sun-spot lay a cat, content with fate and the world. At the corner of the fire sat an old lady, in a chair high-backed, thick-padded, covered with striped stuff. She had her face to the window that looked into the court, and was knitting without regarding her needles. This was Cosmo's grandmother. The daughter of a small laird in the next parish, she had started in life with an overweening sense of her own importance through that of her family, nor, old as she was, had she lived long enough to get rid of it.

I fancy she clung to it the more that from the time of her marriage nothing seemed to go well with the family into which she had married. She and her husband had struggled and striven, but to no seeming purpose ; poverty had drawn its meshes closer and closer around them. They had but one son, the present laird, and when he succeeded, the estate was yet smaller and more heavily encumbered than before. In all likelihood he must leave it to Cosmo, if indeed he left it, in no better condition. Partly from the growing fear of its final loss, he loved the place more than any of his ancestors had loved it, and his attachment to it had come out yet stronger in his son. But although Cosmo the elder fought and wrestled with en croaching poverty, gaining no real advantage, he never forgot small rights in anxiety to be rid of large claims.

What man could, he did to keep his poverty from bearing hard on his dependents, and never master or landlord was more beloved. Such being his character and the condition of his affairs, it is not surprising he should have reached middle age before think ing seriously of marriage. Nor did he then fall in love, in the ordinary sense of the phrase ; he reflected with himself that it would be cowardice to yield so far to poverty as to run the boat of the Warlocks aground. He would not wilfully leave the scrag ends of a property and a history without a man to take them up, and possibly bear them on to redemption ; who could tell what life might be in the stock yet ? Better leave an heir to take the remnant in charge, and carry the name a generation farther, even should it be into yet deeper poverty.

A Warlock could face his fate ! Thereupon, with a sense of the fitness of things not always manifested on such an occasion, he paid his addresses to a woman of five and thirty, the only daughter of the minister of the parish, and was by her accepted with little hesitation. She was a capable and thoroughly brave woman, and, fully informed of the state of his affairs, married him partly in the hope of doing something to help him in his difficulties. A kw pounds which she had saved up, and a trifle that her mother had left her, she placed un reservedly at his disposal, and he, in his abounding honesty, spent the money on his creditors. This bettered things for a time, and, which was of much more consequence, greatly relieved his mind, and gave the life in him a fresh start. Nor was this by any means the only or most operative mode in which the marriage aided his growth, and thus was of infinitely more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for growth is the only final path out of oppression.

Whatever were the feelings with which the laird took his wife home, they were at least those of a gentleman ; and it were a good thing indeed if, at the end of five years, the love of most pairs who marry for love were equal to that of Cosmo Warlock and his middle-aged wife. Now that she was gone, his reverence and love for her were surpassing. From the day almost of his marriage the miseries of life had lost half their bitterness, nor did that half return at her death. He had long instinctively known that outsiders, those even who respected him as an honest man, believed that, somehow or other, they could only conjecture how, he must be to blame for the circumstances he was in. That he was to blame, or that Providence did not take care of the just man, was indeed virtually the unuttered alternative conclusion of many who nevertheless accepted the Bible, the Book of Job in cluded, and would have counted Glenwarlock's rare honesty, had they known it in its fulness, pride or fastidiousness or unjustifiable free-handedness.

Whether to blame or only God-forsaken, they thought and spoke of him as a poor creature ; and the man, from the keen sensitiveness of his nature, had become aware of the fact. But to the wound caused by the misprision of neighbours and friends came the faith and indignant confidence of his wife, closing and binding up and mollifying. The man was of a far finer nature than any of those who judged him, though some of them doubtless would have got rid of their difficulties sooner than he, for he was more honourable in debt than they were out of it : his wife, a woman of strong sense, with an undeveloped stratum THE KITCHEN. 9 of poetry in the heart os it, was able to appreciate his moral delicacy, and she let him know it. This was strength and a lifting up of the head to the husband. And now, although since her death he had had to fight the wolf as constantly as "ever, things retained the look she had helped to give them. _ They had been five years married when she brought him an heir to his poverty, and she lived five years more to help train the child, then, after a short illness, departed, and left the now ageing man virtually alone with his son, a spark of fresh vitality amidst the ancient surroundings.

This was the Cosmo who now, some what sore at heart from the result of his cogitations, entered the kitchen in search of his kind. Just inside the door sat another woman on a three-legged stool, paring potatoes — throwing each, as she cut off what the old lady w*atching her judged a paring far too thick, into a bowl of water. She looked nearly as old as her mistress, though in reality ten years younger. She had come with the late mistress from her father's house, and had always taken, and still took her part against the opposing faction — namely, the grandmother. A second seat of state — not over easy, but comfortable enough, being simply a wide armchair of elm, with a cushion covered in horse-hair — stood at the other corner of the fire. This was the laird's seat, at the moment, as generally all the morning till dinner time, empty.

Cosmo, not once looking up, walked to it straight from the door, seated himself in it, and there sat like one verily lost in thought Now and then, as she pared, Grizzie would cast a keen glance at him out of her bright blue eyes, round whose fire the wrinkles had gathered like rippled ashes. Those eyes were sweet and pleasant, and the expression of her face was one of lovely devotion ; otherwise she was far from beautiful. She gave a grim smile every time her look returned to her potatoes, seeming to say to herself she knew well what he was thinking, though no one else did " He's 'maist a man a'ready ! " she thought in her heart. The old lady also now and then looked over her stocking at the boy, where he sat with his back to the white deal dresser, ornate with homely dishes. " It'll be lang or ye fill that cheir, Cossie, my man !

" she said at length — but not with the smile of play, rather with the severity of admonition, as if it was the boy's first duty to grow in breadth and fill the ancestral seat. Cosmo looked up, but did not speak, and presently was lost again in the thoughts from which the voice of his grandmother had roused him as one on a journey is roused from a waking dream by a jolt ofthe carriage. " What are ye thinkin' aboot, Cossie ? " she said again, in a tone imperative. Her speech was that of a gentlewoman of the old time, when the highest-born in Scotland spoke Scotch. Not yet did Cosmo reply. Reverie is sometimes a traitor even to respect. " Mph !" said his grandmother, offended at his silence, "ye'll hae to learn mainners afore ye're fit to be laird o' Glenwarlock, yoong Cosmo ! " A shadow of indignation passed over Grizzie's rippled, rather than wrinkled face, but she said nothing.

There was a time to speak and a time to be silent; nor was Grizzie indebted to Solomon, but to her own experience and practice, for the wisdom of the saw. Only the potato next pared splashed loud in the water, and the old lady knew as well what that meant, as if the splash had been an articulate sound from the lips of the old partisan. The boy rose, and coming forward like one walking in his sleep, stood up before his grandmother, and said absently — " What was ye sayin', gran'mamma ? " " I was sayin' what ye wadna hearken till, an' that's eneuch," she answered, willing to show offence. " Say't again, gran'mamma, gien ye please. I wasna noticin'." " Na ! I s' warran' ye frae noticin' ! There ye winna gang, whaur yer ain fule fancy doesna lead the gait. Cosmo, ye gie ower muckle tether to wull {wild) thoucht ; some day ye'll be laid i' the dub (mire), followin' what has naither sense intil't nor this warl's guid.