His Great Experiment

Front matter

i HIS GREAT EXPERIMENT. By W. ANDERSON SMITH. Author of /} "Scientia: A City by the Sea," &c, &l. (Blasgow : MACLAREN & SONS, 128 RENFIELD STREET. London: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO. 1S89. All rights reserved.] CONTENTS. PAGE Chapter I. The Man on the Mook, ----- 9 II. Is this the Lady ? ----- 19 III. A Little Meeting and a Great One, - - -32 IV. High Spirits and Water, ----- 43 V. Children of Abraham, ----- 51 VI. A Face or a Fancy ? ------ 63 VII. A Highland Bull, 70 VIIT. The Devil and all His Angels, - - - - 79 IX. A Dead Dog and a Living Lioness, - - - 87 X. Glamour on the Moorland, - - - - 99 XI. An Awkward Connection, ----- 109 XII. A Chamber of Horror, ----- 117 XIII. In Hades, -------- 127 XIV. What Will He Do with Her ? - - - - 130 XV. An Old Retainer, -.--.. 143 XVI. The Master is a Sneezer, ----- 149 XVII.

He Faces the Devil, ------ 163 XVIII. A Substantial Apparition, 168 XIX. Master Tom, 180 XX. Miss Esther Plays a Bold Game, - - - 191 XXI. Cornered, - 202 XXII. At Her Request ! 209 XXIII. Things get Fankled, - - - - - - 218 XXIV. By the Pentland, -_-... 227 XXV. Lady Mary gives a Dinner, - 244 XXVI. What Have You Done with Him I - - - 254 XXVII. Where is the Boy ? -.--_. 261 XXVIII. Final and Most Interesting, - 268 XXIX. The End of a " Pretty Scheme," - - - His Great Experiment.

Chapter I

the man on the moor. THE haggs seemed scarce to yield beneath his stride and leap, as with an easy, swinging movement the tall and powerful figure crossed the sloppy bog. The very heads of the gay canna, chatter ing and kissing one another in the breeze, were careless of such a light step, until they found themselves driven firmly into the solid peat, to reassert themselves no more. There is a cold snap in the breeze, and the light that glints on the wet pools, and scuds play fully over the green banks of more solid ground, or seems to leap over the broken tufts with the stunted heathery crowns, is becom ing more concentrated, more vivid, and more deceptive. The up turned face of the "man on the moor" is a touch more anxious, and his shoulders are thrown forward with a still greater impetus, as he trusts to promptitude and presence of mind in his onward course, where he lately picked his way with skilful foresight.

Soon his impetuous forward movement becomes a flight, for the handful of daylight is being devoured by the black cloud-demon that, with solid front, has long been creeping up from the south west, and now with spiteful ferocity spits viciously upon the patient moor and the impatient traveller. Well he knows what is coming, for the keen wind straight from the Atlantic means more than a message, warm and nourishing, from the beneficent bosom of the Gulf Stream. It comes with tales of staggering mountains of ice from the sliddery glaciers of Greenland, chilling the air and the water, and preparing patent shot-manufactories for the inhabitants of the desolate peat haggs upon which the kinder, softer, upper atmosphere flings its moist warm breath in vain. Hitherto his feet have passed in safety over the sloppy land, his speed and skill carrying him dexterously over the most deceptive and boggy traps ; but now the water dances upwards from his flying steps, and the suck of his feet from HIS UKEAT EXPERIMENT. the softer portions sounds like the smack of the vulgar kisses of the demons of the moor, rejoicing in the wild aerial visitor that is coming to render still more secure and impassable their rarely penetrated haunts.

No wonder even this vigorous and self-reliant traverser of the wilds ties the wings of Mercury to his London made boots, and draws his soft Parisian felt close over his face ; for the shot-manufactory is at work, and the hail-stones are descending in myriads, averaging in size the best buckshot, and driven with all the skill, all the fury, all the reckless profusion of ammunition that a bitter sou'- wester, working round to the north, can throw upon a belated and a shelterless traveller in the treeless, rockless, almost landless stretches of the wilder and less-frequented regions of the west. No wonder there was more than a little dread in his heart as the "man on the moor" reviewed his position in the midst of his desperate flight. The heavy clouds might indeed rise, but only to leave the cloud of night behind them, and so far as he had gone he had not found a stretch of ground that could yield a resting place to his good six feet of humanity, unable to hob-nob with the frogs and the water newts, and requiring some little shelter from the outer elements in the wild Outer Hebrides.

Some such thoughts flashed through his mind, and he had plunged with blind and reckless speed through a quaking bog, with such unhappy results that he resolved to curl up in the first good patch that stood properly out of the surrounding semi-liquid expanse, when he found himself kicking his foot against a protruding rock, tramping on a firm sward, and the next moment with still unabated speed he went headlong over a recumbent stirk, only to tumble against a turf dyke that evidenced human proximity. This was an unexpected delight. Half-stunned and wholly amazed, he was endeavouring to collect his senses, when a voice that at first seemed to come from the centre of the earth called to the now disturbed animals in a strange guttural tongue that was yet sweet and pleasant to the ear. Still recumbent where he had fallen against the dyke of turf, the wanderer sought to locate the voice that had been called forth by the trampling of the disturbed animals, and at length it appeared to come from the other side of the turf against which he lay.

The still disturbed animals complained in low murmurs and continued restless, so at length a figure appeared within a foot or two of the man, and after calling quietly and in soft tones to the cattle was about to with draw. The "man on the moor" was prepared to meet a brownie or a dwarf, a digger Indian, or any semi-human shape that in traveller's tales or fairy lore had ever been conjured up before his imagina tion, and he had half made up his mind rather to lie quiet and en dure the mitigated force of the gale where he was, under the shelter of the erection, than to leap into dangers he was unable to under stand or imagine the extent or purport of. But who could doubt that soft voice, and pleasing if wild and weird expression and tone, even if the light reflected from the heaped hailstones had not re vealed a comely face surrounded by a shawl, and a well-favoured hand that held the latter tight at the throat !

The face was too distinctly human to be misunderstood for anything else, too comely in form, too brilliant in eye, too full-blooded to belong to ought but a full-flavoured daughter of humanity ; and although she lay with her head and shoulders half out of a hole, into which she was evidently about to withdraw, seeing the figures of the cattle had again settled down, even the wanderer could not doubt the presence before him, scarcely credible as it otherwise might have seemed, of a daughter of the people whose strange speech was to him as un pronounceable as their ways were inconceivable. He had now quite resolved to announce himself, but the quick eye of the earth-dweller anticipated him, and withdrawing suddenly so that only her face protruded from the aperture, she spoke to the strange figure lying against the side of the dyke in an unknown tongue, but yet with an unmistakable tone of enquiry.

Rising to his knees so as to be still under the shelter of the turf, the man announced himself as a belated wanderer caught in the storm, and begged to be allowed to share any shelter however humble. Although he spoke the Saxon tongue he hoped, more than expected, that this apparently wild and outlawed Celtic damsel would understand him ; and when in reply to this question she asked him where he had come from at such an hour, her pleasing English, with far less intonation and greater purity than would have proceeded from any daughter of the people in a southern country, almost checked his reply in his startled sur prise. His interlocutor had now half turned and called to one in side, whither a whispered conversation had been coming intermit tently, the result of the double converse being that the "man on the moor " was invited to enter the little aperture, leading he knew not whither.

Never did the wayfarer require greater courage than when he stooped his stately head and crept beneath the turf, finding a3 he proceeded that he could not go very far, even had he not been nearly choked and blinded by the dense smoke that filled the little primitive shelter. He had as yet been merely permitted entrance on sufferance, for his introduction was clearly inadequate, and a sense of uncertainty and restraint was about his entertainers as clearly as it was around himself. Beyond this feeling on his part there was the peculiar idea of being caught in a trap, bound hand and foot, and at the mercy of his quondam hosts ; for he could not rise to his feet, there was not space enough, and the six feet of room that was apparently all they had at their disposal could not afford him the luxury of stretching himself, even had be been the only occupant.

But gradually his eyes grew accustomed to the smoke, and the few peats having been turned on the floor threw out enough light to distinguish his company, whilst they enabled him to ob serve the movements of the girl who had introduced him, and who, crouching upon her knees, produced from a low shelf in the turf wall of the shelter a bowl of milk, which she presented frankly to the man. As she did so she remarked that, wherever he came from or whoever he might be, he must be needful of nourishment after crossing the moor on such a night, and apologised simply and without affectation for being unable to offer stronger refreshment on the occasion. The man took the bowl thankfully, and drank the delicious contents with a sense of luxury, for it was full of the rich milk of the rough-coated, soft-eyed cattle of the far islands, that is more akin to cream, when the poor creatures can get a sufficiency of nourishment from the wild moors to enable them to produce anything whatever.

By this time the wanderer had been enabled to note the figure of a powerful young man stretched along the floor, with his head in the lap of a comely young woman, whose eyes were alone visible from under the plaid she had wrapped around her. Slowly his eyes noted as they circled the shelter that he was inside a small circular erection of turf, with two doors, one of which in the face of the gale was turfed up entirely ; whilst the other was more than half closed, reducing the opening to the hole through which he had, with much difficulty and in fear and trembling, crept. It was soon evident that beyond a few questions, a close examination, and a good humoured sufferance, the stranger was to receive no more attention — troublesome, annoying, or otherwise — from the two we have noted, who conversed together quietly in whispers, and who were quite evidently speaking in a universal language, known all the world over amongst the young and light-hearted, and called in the English tongue " Courting."

So the man naturally turned to his introducer, and sought a subject for conversation, if only to break the stiffness and relieve the monotony. There was no difficulty at all in the matter. The shawl had been allowed to drop from the head on to the shoulders of the girl, showing to the full her rich growth of dark hair, her black, large, heavily fringed eyes, cheeks with a delicacy of hue only to be accounted for by the stewing she received in the close atmosphere of peat reek in which she passed the hours away from the keen blast of the moors, and teeth as white as the canna heads, and hard as flint. The interloper was forced to acknowledge to himself that this comely damsel, with the swelling bosom, the softly curving figure, and the pleasant smile, was no inane product of fat pastures ; but evidently a bright, quick-witted woman, as soft spoken as she was soft mannered.

For he had not been long in the little den until she had managed by simple, little, unnameable ways to place him quite at his ease, and he felt that no lady of the land could place her mansion at his disposal more grace fully or more graciously than this homely island girl had made him free to the corner of her rude shelter, in which he with difficulty could stow his limbs. Meantime she leaned back against the turf wall of the shelter, and between the playing of her knitting-needles occasionally flashed her long black lashes, as she peeped at the fair face of the stranger. And his was not a face that induced one to question it. The long auburn locks and the large bluish-grey eyes were boyish looking and hearty, the large mobile mouth smiled sweetly when it pleased, and no cne required to look twice at the strong bony hands and the heavy shoulders, to tell that the man before them had just emerged from youth into a manhood as beautiful as it was vigorous.

No wonder the black-eyed girl, forming the unhappy " third party " in the lonely shelter on the wild moor, on a wild cold night in early summer, should look with favourable eyes on this noble looking visitor, who had come like a breath from a richer world to give a glow to her cheek and a stoon to her heart. Who can calcu late the feelings that creep over the mind and jump into the life of a young girl of the humblest class, at being thus brought face to face in the closest relation with one richly dowered alike by nature and by fortune. What possibilities are there not in actual human life, and what still greater possibilities and probabilities are there not in the imaginative minds of the young, and in the waiting hearts of girlhood ? If the king does not now marry the nut-brown beggar maid, the kings of men who struggle upward, and stretch forth strong hands about and around us, link themselves as strangely to-day as in the most romantic and unreasonable ages of antiquity.

Humanity is as human as ever it was, and the heart beats in unison with some other heart with as regardless tenacity as when Helen dragged the Grecian heroes to the plains of Troy and the captive Jewish maid led captive the eastern autocrat. A simple action and a little matter, too childish to be of any account, you would say, as the girl stooped and drew with her fingers from the hot ashes a roundish ball and handed it with smiling good humour to the stranger, constrained to recline, by the force of circumstances and a circumscribed space, close to the crouching figure of the knitter. To take the proffered article was an instinctive act of civility, to drop it hastily was the still more instinctive act of the tender fingers of ultra-civilisation ! " What is it, and why should you play such a trick upon me 1" asked the young man, with a questioning glance, that said he did not believe in any hidden desire to injure, but was really merely ignorant of what was expected of him, and unequal to the occasion.

The girl stooped forward again, and taking the article that had fallen and rolled away from him, broke it, and displayed to the astonished eyes of the stranger a potato, beautifully cooked in the hot ashes. Hard as it felt, and covered with the adhering ashes, what wonder that a civilised and luxuriously-bred southerner should have been ignorant of its character ! He laughed a low musical laugh that showed teeth as white as those of his companion, although they had in all likelihood been purchased by a liberal use of brushes and tooth-powder, in place of being the growth of a system that never knew an ache, and a stomach that never men tioned itB existence except to beg for fresh supplies of the simplest and wholesomest diet. Of course he ate his potato with pleasure, as the greatest gourmet might have done under the circumstances, and equally of course the simple introduction proved most efficacious.

" What was the potato doing there at this time of night ? " asked the interloper, in a low whisper, as best suited the surroundings, to all appearance. For four persons, in separate couples, in a low turf erection six feet in diameter, could scarcely be otherwise than most confidential, unless they had been strangely out of place. "It was in a much more sensible place than you were a few minutes ago ; and I know where it came from and where it went, was the whispered response, with a little mocking curl about the mouth, and a quick glance of enquiry to see how her speech was taken. The stranger met her eye with bold but kindly good humour, and replied with apparent promptitude and ease that he had come ashore from a yacht lying in the distant loch that ran up to the vicinity of the shooting lodge, where he had been visiting the occupants ; afterwards starting upon a scamper across the wide and solitary moor, in order to see its character and enjoy a run on the open, after his long confinement in the narrow confines of the yacht.

The tale seemed reasonable enough, and what cause could there be for suspicion ; and yet the story was not absolutely true, and the name of "Charles Connell," although long borne by the young man in innocence of its falsity, was yet a false one, and not the one he ought to have given to the frank, questioning glance of the girl. Why he gave this name it would have puzzled himself to explain, and still more difficult would it have been to have satisfied his own mind as to the distorted facts of his arrival. There flashed across his brain the absurdity of his position, lying amid such ignoble surroundings chatting familiarly, and, despite himself, he was forced to acknowledge, with sympathetic pleasure, to a humble daughter of the moor. What would his friends think of such a proceeding, what would his college chums say of his conduct, could they but peep in upon him thus crouching under a few piled peat in the midst of the desolate expanse ?

He felt the reasonableness of this explanation of his conduct, and yet a minute after could he have recalled it he would have done so. But the lie, such as it was, had gone forth, and he soon felt as if he had crept into a more confined, a dingier, more ignoble hole than the little shelter, and one into which a man of integrity and true manhood would never have crawled. "It is well you found our little shieling, for it is the one furthest on the moor, and had you passed either on one side or the other you would not have been able to reach any of the neighbours," said the girl, " and that would have been very sad on such a night, and you without a plaid to hap you," she continued, sympathetically. " I had just made up my mind to give in, and lie down in the first dry place I came to, when I stumbled upon this queer place, without in the least knowing where I was, or what it was— in fact, I don't know yet, and you speak as if there were more."

" It is a 'shieling,' a place we put up in the summer as a shelter for us when we are herding our cattle on the muors, and where wei keep the milk of our cows until we can send it home to our black houses near the seashore," she explained. " That is a strange idea, to live in a place like this when you can set a better house to stay in, but I suppose you would have gone home had the night not been so severe ? " he asked. " Oh, no 1 we hardly go home for six weeks or two months if th« pasture is good, and our sweethearts come to see us here for a little holiday, and we would not give this time for all the rest of the year. Summer is summer to us, and a right good time. " She spoke with such emphasis that there was no mistaking her honest conviction as to the delight of the time when the cows were milking in rich abundance on the sweet grasses of the moor, and the girl's buirdly brothers and friends came a ten-mile stroll of an evening to fatten on the produce, and gather increase of loving kindness under the mellifluent influence of the cream-bowl.

" So your sweetheart didn't turn up to-night, and you were fain to put up with a poor substitute, whose chat might help to pass the long hours before morning, eh?" asked Charles Connell, smiling. "That is all the gratitude you show for being allowed to enter the shieling, that is almost as sacred to our sweethearts as the shelter of our plaids. I took you in out of pity, and you think I wanted company for long hours. Fie, fie ! Mr Connell, the hours are short enough till daylight in this place, and if our sweethearts are too faithless to join us, we have always the company of a Gaelic song ; and that won't quarrel with anybody, and will always come at our bidding and stay almost as long as we like. For you must know, Mr. Connell " — and the name was always spoken with a mocking humour that could not be objected to, and yet touched him keenly — "you must know that our songs are much longer than our summer nights, and easily help us through them.

" "They will be made for the long winter ones, I suppose," observed Connell, ' ' and will take up less room in the ' shieling,' as you call it." "Yes ! and will let the smoke out, which you won't do, lying there right opposite the doorway," interpolated the voice of the other recumbent young man, evidently by no means very favourably disposed towards the new-comer, who had thus broken in upon a humble bower devoted to the little winged god that is so regard less of person and of place. " I am no doubt in the way," replied Connell, with as much dignity as his posture permitted ; "how much is partly your blame and partly my progenitor's : the one contracted the ' shieling,' the other unduly expanded my untutored and unaccommodating limbs." " No fears," was the good-humoured reply ; " if you only take your fair share and move up to the lass, she will help to make you more comfortable than you are, and let you stow away your chaincables of legs without taking up the whole place with them.

We won't tell her lad, and she is a kind lass at anyrate." Charles was about to turn and expostulate with his black-eyed friend on her companion's impudent disposal of her attentions, but, as he did so, he found her quietly prepare her knee for him to rest his head upon, a tacit invitation he was not slow to accept. "It is very kind of you to receive a stranger so," said Connell, as he stretched his limbs out as well as he could, while the damsel gently smoothed his flowing yellow locks and pattedhis soft cheek with evident gratification ; and he could not help looking up with interest and kindly feelings at the glowing, semi-tropical beauty of the girl, who might as well have been born and nurtured amid palms and pine-apples as amid the peat-bogs and their rough coated kine— have as well handed him goat's milk in the environs of Rome as the rich draught of " Highlanders" in the land of peat-reek.

"You speak to me better with your eyes than with your tongue, and a straight look is like an open Bible, and speaks words of peace," said the girl gently, "and then where there is no room for enemies there is more room for kindness, is there not? and why should I not be kind to one who must need a little kindness so far away from home, and him so little accustomed to our rough and poor entertainment?" " Your entertainment may be poor, but it is anything but rough, and I can endure this sort of treatment with great courage and fearlessness," answered Charles, with an amusing expression of determination on his mouth. For now that he knew he was amongst the simple-hearted people of the country, at their ordinary summer avocations, he felt that he was quite secure, even had he not met such a kind and natural reception from at least one of the company.

The whispered talk of their companions had been gradually weakening, and it soon appeared that they had dropped off to sleep, the damsel with her feet towards the few peats, and her back reclining against the turf wall ; whilst her sweetheart held one of her hands in his two, and her other rested as it had been, fondling his massive but gentle face. The close atmosphere, the proximity of the fire, to which a few fresh peats had been added, and the generally soporific character of the situation in which he found himself placed, had its natural effect, and Charles found his eyes get heavy despite the whispers of his communicative friend. "Tormad, you call him," he was saying ; "and he has not come to-night, as the storm would keep him behind." "Yes; and perhaps the boats would not get back from the fishing, and they would have a bad night : it would be very hard to lift the lines with the squalls so heavy, and the showers of hail would make it hard to see the harbour, if they were out at the far banks and late of leaving," she whispered somewhat sadly.

" You must be anxious about your lad, then, and it would be a pity if anything happened just when the summer is " and the yawns that had been gradually increasing in number now threatened to master the speaker. At the same time he drew his knees up nearly to his chest instinctively, for the current of air from the open hole had been chilling his feet, until he was forced to with draw them from their exposed position. The young woman at once divined his condition, and advised him to sit beside her with his feet to the fire, in which position she gave him half of her plaid, and he soon found himself dropping off to sleep under circumstances such as he would have thought absolutely impossible even a few hours before. How little we know of what we are capable, and how we are tyrannised over by our immediate surroundings, to an extent that we are absolutely incapable of prejudging.

To have suggested to this young man that he could accommodate himself, even for a moment, to the peculiar life he had thus unexpectedly obtained an insight into, would have produced from him only a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders ; and yet, when the actuality crept upon his senses, he slid into the position as naturally as if he had been to the manner born. Was there such a wide gulf after all between this earth-dweller and the outcome of the cultivation of the South ; or was the film of civilisation so thin and so freshly superimposed, that a rub from the homespun sleeve of this womanly product of the moor was sufficient to clear it off and expose the human nature that so strongly sympathised with other human nature, so intensely human and so thoroughly natural ? Reason as he might have done had weariness and sleep not overtaken him, Charles Connell could scarcely have persuaded himself that he was doing much wrong to accept the gentle ministrations of a gracious damsel whose sweetheart had not come forward to time, but who, nevertheless, merely proffered her loving-kindness as the natural gift of a gentle woman to a very presentable young man.

As he dropped over he kept thinking to himself, "It's an uncommonly queer position to be in " but what he would think when morning, with its cold air, and searching beams, and rude severity of intellect came to put him through his facings, was a question not to be put before a warm peat fire, sharing the plaid and the company of a kindly lassie, and under the glamour of a pair of witching black eyes. And so he slept, slept soundly, slept long, and never noted how carefully he was scanned by all the eyes in the " shieling" during the passing hours, as the peats were pushed into the fire, and the fresh gleam lighted up his lionhke face and his flowing yellow locks, so markedly different from the darkened charms of his companion. Alas for the ideal and the actual ! In one short hour the ideal of this young man had been somewhat rudely dethroned, and Nature, the ruthless, the clear-visioned, and the all-powerful, had toppled over with a touch of its hand the intellectual and cultivated house of cards that years of training, of learning, and of not unwise endeavour had so carefully, and now apparently hopelessly, reared.