A HIGHLAND moor is in itself a beautiful thing. When it is in full bloom of purple heather, with all those breaks and edges of emerald green which betray the bog below, with the sweet-scented gale sending forth its odor as it is crushed underfoot, and the yellow gorse rising in broken lines of gold, and here and there a half-grown rowan, with its red berries, and here and there a gleam of clear dark water, nothing can be more full of variety and the charm of wild and abounding life. But when the sky is gray and the weather bleak, and the heather is still in the green, or dry with the gray and rustling husks of last year’s bloom; when there is little color, and none of those effects of light and shade which make a drama of shifting interest upon the Highland hills and lochs, all this is very different, and the long sweep of wild and broken ground, under a low and dark sky, becomes an image of desolation instead of the fresh and blooming and fragrant moor of early autumn. Dalrugas was a tall, pinched house, with a high gable cut in those rectangular lines which are called crow steps in Scotland, rising straight up from the edge of the moor. The height and form of this gave a parsimonious and niggardly look—though the rooms were by no means contemptible within—which was increased by the small windows pierced high up in the wall. There was no garden on that side, not so much as the little plot to which even a cottage has a right. Embedded within the high, sharp-cornered walls behind was a kitchen-garden or kale-yard, where the commonest vegetables were grown with a border of gooseberries and a few plants of sweet-william and appleringie; but this was not visible to give any softness to the prospect. The heather came up uncompromisingly, with a little hillock of green turf here and there, to the very walls, which had once been whitewashed, and still in their forlorn dinginess lent a little variety to the landscape; but this did but add to the cold, pinched, and resistant character of the house. It looked like a prim ancient lady, very spare, and holding her skirts close round her in the pride of penury and evil fortune. The door was in the outstanding gable, and admitted directly into a low passage from which a spiral stair mounted to the rooms above. On the ground-floor there was a low, dark-pannelled dining-room and library full of ancient books, but these rooms were used only when Sir Robert came for shooting, which happened very rarely. The drawing-room upstairs was bare also, but yet had some lingerings of old-fashioned grace. From the small, deep-set, high windows there was a wide, unbroken view over the moor. The moor stretched everywhere, miles of it, gray as the low sky which hung over it, a canopy of clouds. The only relief was a bush of gorse here and there half in blossom, for the gorse is never wholly out of blossom, as every-body knows, and the dark gleam of the water in a cutting, black as the bog which it was meant to drain. The dreary moorland road which skirted the edge passed in front of the house, but was only visible from these windows at a corner, where it emerged for a moment from a group of blighted firs before disappearing between the banks of heather and whin, which had been cut to give it passage. This was the only relief from the monotony of the moor.
It was in this house that Lily and her maid arrived after a journey which had not been so uncheerful as they anticipated. A journey by stage-coach through a beautiful country can scarcely be dreary in the worst of circumstances. The arrivals, the changes, the villages and towns passed through, the contact with one’s fellow-creatures which is inevitable, shake off more or less the most sullen discontent; and Lily was not sullen, while Beenie was one of the most open-hearted of human creatures, ready to interest herself in every one she met, and to talk to them and give her advice upon their circumstances. The pair met all sorts of people on their journey, and they made almost as many friendships, and thus partially forgot the penitential object of their own travels, and that they were being sent off to the ends of the earth.
It was only when “the gig” met them at the village, where the coach stopped on its northern route, that their destination began to oppress either the mistress or the maid. This was on the afternoon of a day which had been partially bright and partially wet, the best development of weather to be hoped for in the North. The village was a small collection of cottages, partly with tiled roofs, making a welcome gleam of color, but subdued by a number of those respectable stone houses with blue tiles, which were and are the ideal of comfortable sobriety, which, in defiance of all the necessities of the landscape, the Scotch middle class has unfortunately fixed upon. The church stood in the midst—a respectable oblong barn, with a sort of long extinguisher in the shape of a steeple attached to it. On the outskirts the cottages became less comfortable and more picturesque, thatched, and covered with lichens. It was a well-to-do village. The “merchant,” as he was called, i. e., the keeper of the “general” shop, was a Lowland Scot, very contemptuous of “thae Highlanders,” and there was a writer or solicitor in the place, and a doctor, besides the minister, who formed a little aristocracy. The English minister so called, that is, the Episcopalian, came occasionally—once in two or three Sundays—to officiate in a smaller barn, without any extinguisher, which held itself a little apart in a corner, not to mingle with the common people who did not possess Apostolical Succession; though, indeed, in those days there was little controversy, the Episcopalians being generally of that ritual by birth, and unpolemical, making no pretensions to superiority over the native Kirk.
The gig that met the travellers at Kinloch-Rugas was a tall vehicle on two wheels, which had once been painted yellow, but which was scarcely trim enough to represent that type of respectability which a certain young Thomas Carlyle, pursuing the vague trade of a literary man in Edinburgh, had declared it to be. It was followed closely by a rough cart, in which Beenie and the boxes were packed away. They were not large boxes. One, called “the hair trunk,” contained Lily’s every-day dresses, but no provision for any thing beyond the most ordinary needs, for there was no society nor any occasion for decorative garments on the moors. Beenie’s box was smaller, as became a serving-woman. These accessories were all in the fashion of their time, which was (like Waverley, yet, ah, so unlike!) sixty years since or thereabout—in the age before railways, or at least before they had penetrated to the distant portions of the country. The driver of the gig was a middle-aged countryman, very decent in a suit of gray “plaidin”—what we now call tweed—with a head of sandy hair grizzled and considerably blown about by the wind across the moor. His face was ruddy and wrinkled, of the color of a winter apple, in fine shades of red and brown, his shaggy eyebrows a little drawn together—by the “knitting of his brows under the glaring sun,” and the setting of his teeth against the breeze. He said, “Hey, Beenie!” as his salutation to the party before he doffed his bonnet to the young lady. Lily was not sure that it was quite respectful, but Dougal meant no disrespect. He was a little shy of her, being unfamiliar with her grown-up aspect, and reverential of her young ladyhood; but he was at his ease with Robina, who was a native of the parish, the daughter of the late blacksmith, and “weel connectit” among the rustic folk. It would have been an ease to Dougal to have had the maid beside him instead of the mistress, and it was to Beenie he addressed his first remarks over his shoulder, from pure shyness and want of confidence in his own powers of entertaining a lady. “Ye’ll have had a long journey,” he said. “The coach she’s aye late. She’s like a thriftless lass, Beenie, my woman. She just dallies, dallies at the first, and is like to break her neck at the end.”
“But she showed no desire to break her neck, I assure you,” said Lily. “She was in no hurry. We have just taken it very easy up hill and down dale.”
“Ay, ay!” he said, “we ken the ways o’ them.” With a glance over his shoulder: “Are you sure you’re weel happit up, Beenie, for there’s a cauld wind crossing the moor?”
“And how is Katrin, Dougal?” Lily asked, fastening her cloak up to her throat.
“Oh, she’s weel eneuch; you’ll see little differ since ye left us last. We’re a wee dried up with the peat-reck, and a wee blawn aboot by the wind. But ye’ll mind that fine, Beenie woman, and get used to’t like her and me.”
Lily laid impatient fingers on the reins, pulling Dougal’s hand, as if he had been the unsteady rough pony he drove. “Speak to me,” she said, “you rude person, and not to Beenie. Do you think I am nobody, or that I cannot understand?”
“Bless us all! No such a thought was in my head. Beenie, are ye sitting straight? for when the powny’s first started whiles he lets out.”
“Let me drive him!” Lily cried. “I’ll like it all the better if he lets out; and you can go behind if you like and talk to Beenie at your ease.”
“Na, na,” said Dougal, with a grin. “He kens wha’s driving him. A bit light hand like yours would have very sma’ effect upon Rory. Hey, laddies! get out of my powny’s way!”
Rory carried out the prognostics of his driver by tossing his shaggy head in the air, and making a dash forward, scattering the children who had gathered about to stare at the new arrivals; though before he got to the end of the village street he had settled into his steady pace, which was quite uninfluenced by any skill in driving on Dougal’s part, but was entirely the desire and meaning of that very characteristic member of society—himself. The day had settled into an afternoon serenity and unusual quietness of light. The mountains stood high in the even air, without any dramatic changes, Schehallion, with his conical crest, dominating the lesser hills, and wearing soberly his mantle of purple, subdued by gray. The road lay for a few miles through broken ground, diversified with clumps of wood, wind-blown firs, and beeches tossing their feathery branches in the air, crossing by a little bridge a brown and lively trout stream, which went brawling through the village, but afterward fell into deeper shadows, penetrating between close fir-woods, before it reached the edge of the moor, round which it ran its lonely way. Lily’s spirits began to rise. The sense of novelty, the pleasant feeling of arrival, and of all the possibilities which relieve the unknown, rose in her breast. Something would surely happen; something would certainly be found to make the exile less heavy, and to bring back a little hope. The little river greeted her like an old friend. “Oh, I remember the Rugas,” she cried. “What a cheery little water! Will they let me fish in it, Dougal? Look how it sparkles! I think it must remember me.”
“It’s just a natural objick,” said Dougal. “It minds naebody; and what would you do—a bit lady thing—fishing troot? Hoots! a crookit pin in a burn would set ye better, a little miss like you.”
In those days there were no ladies who were salmon fishers. Such a thing would have seemed to Dougal an outrage upon every law.
“Don’t be contemptuous,” said Lily, with a laugh. “You’ll find I am not at all a little miss. Just give me the reins and let me wake Rory up. I mean to ride him about the moor.”
“I’m doubting if you’ll do that,” said Dougal, with politeness, but reserve.
“Why shouldn’t I do it? Perhaps you think I don’t know how to ride. Oh, you can trust Rory to me, or a better than Rory.”
“There’s few better in these parts,” said Dougal with some solemnity. “He’s a beast that has a great deal of judgment. He kens well what’s his duty in this life. I’m no thinking you’ll find it that easy to put him to a new kind of work. He has plenty of his ain work to do.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Lily.
“Ah,” replied Dougal cautiously, “we’ll just see about that. We must na come to any hasty judgment. Cheer up, lad! Yon’s the half of the road.”
“Is this only the half of the road?” said Lily, with a shudder. They were coming out of the deep shade of the woods, and now before them, in its full width and silence, stretched the long levels of the moor. It was even now, in these days before the heather, a beautiful sight, with the mountains towering in the background, and the bushes of the ling, which later in the year would be glorious with blossoms, coming down, mingled with the feathery plumes of the seeding grass, to the very edge of the road: beautiful, wild, alive with sounds of insects, and that thrill of the air which we call silence—silence that could be heard. The wide space, the boundless sky, the freedom of the pure air, gave a certain exaltation to Lily’s soul, but at the same time overwhelmed her with a sense of the great loneliness and separation from all human interests which this great vacancy made. “Only half-way,” she repeated, with a gasp.
“It’s a gey lang road, but it’s a very good road, with few bad bits. An accustomed person need have nae fear by night or day. There was an ill place, where ye cross the Rugas again, at the head of the Black Scaur; but it’s been mended up just uncommon careful, and ye need have nae apprehension; besides that, there’s me that ken every step, and Rory that is maist as clever as me.”
“But it’s the end of the world,” Lily said.
“No that, nor even the end of the parish, let alone the countryside,” said Dougal. “It’s just ignorance, a’ that. It’s the end o’ naething but your journey, and a bonnie place when you’re there; and a good dinner waiting for ye; and a grand soft bed, and your grandmither’s ain cha’lmer, that was one of the grandest leddies in the North Country. Na, na, missy, it’s no the end of the world. If ye look far ahead, yonder by the east, as soon as we come to the turn of the road, ye’ll maybe, if it’s clear, see the tower. That’s just a landmark over half the parish. Ye’ll mind it, Beenie? It’s lang or ye’ve seen so bonnie a sight.”
“Oh, ay, I mind it,” said Beenie, subdued. She had once thought, with Dougal, that the tower of Dalrugas was a fine sight. But she had tasted the waters of civilization, and the long level of the moor filled her breast, like that of her mistress, with dismay; though, indeed, it was with the eyes of Lily, rather than her own, that the kind woman saw this scene. For herself things would not be so bad. Dougal and Katrin in the kitchen would form a not uncongenial society for Robina. She did not anticipate for herself much difficulty in fitting in again to a familiar place; and she would always have her young mistress to pet and console, and to take care of. But Lily—where would Lily find anything to take her out of herself? Beenie realized, by force of sympathy, the weary gazing from the windows, the vacant landscape, through which no one ever would come, the loneliness indescribable of the great solitary moor; not one of her young companions to come lightly over the heather; neither a lad nor lass in whom the girl would find a playfellow. “Ay, I mind it,” said Beenie, shaking her head, with big tears filling her eyes.
Lily, for her part, did not feel disposed to shed any tears; her mind was full of indignation and harsher thoughts. Who could have any right to banish her here beyond sight or meeting of her kind? And it was not less but more bitter to reflect that the domestic tyrant who had banished her was scarcely so much to blame as the lover who would risk nothing to save her. If he had but stood by her—held out his hand—what to Lily would have been poverty or humbleness? She would have been content with any bare lodging in the old town, high among the roofs. She would have worked her fingers to the bone—at least Beenie would have done so, which was the same thing. That was a sacrifice she would have made willingly; but this that was demanded—who had any right to exact it? and for what was it to be exacted? For money, miserable money, the penny siller that could never buy happiness. Lily’s eyes burned like coal. Her cheeks scorched and blazed. Oh, how hard was fate, and how undeserved! For what had she done? Nothing, nothing to bring it upon herself.
It was another long hour before the gig turned the corner by the trees, where there was a momentary view of Dalrugas, and plunged again between the rising banks, where the road ran in a deep cutting, ascending the last slopes. “We’ll be at the house in five minutes,” Dougal said.