Part 18 (1/2)
”The home-staying laird--the full scholar--at last the writer--the master ... it is a good fortune!”
As Ian spoke he stretched his arms, he leaned back in his chair and regarded the room, the fireplace, the little furnace, and the shelves ranged with the quaint, makes.h.i.+ft apparatuses of boyhood. He looked at the green boughs without the loophole windows and at the crossing lights and shadows, and the brown books upon the brown table, and at last, under somewhat lowered lids, at Alexander. What moved in the bottom of his mind it would be hard to say. He thought that he loved the man sitting over against him, and so, surely, to some great amount he did. But somewhere, in the thousand valleys behind them, he had stayed in an inn of malice and had carried hence poison in a vial as small as a single cell. What suddenly made that past to burn and set it in the present it were hard to say. A spark perhaps of envy or of jealousy, or a movement of contempt for Alexander's ”fortune.” But he looked at his friend with half-closed eyes, and under the sea of consciousness crawled, half-blind, half-asleep, a willingness for Glenfernie to find some thorn in life. The wish did not come to consciousness. It was far down. He thought of himself as steel true to Alexander. And in a moment the old love drew again. He put out his hands across the board. ”When are we going to see Mother Binning and to light the fire in the cave?... There are not many like you, Alexander! I'm glad to get back.”
”I'm glad to have you back, old sworn-fellow, old Saracen!”
They clasped hands. Gray eyes and brown eyes with gold flecks met in a gaze that was as steady with the one as with the other. It was Alexander who first loosened handclasp.
They talked of affairs, particular and general, of Ian's late proceedings and the lairds.h.i.+p of Alexander, of men and places that they knew away from this countryside. Ian watched the other as they talked. Whatever there was that had moved, down there in the abyss, was asleep again.
”Old Steadfast, you are ruddy and joyous! How long since I was here, in the winter? Four months? Well, you've changed. What is it?... Is it love? Are you in love?”
”If I am--” Glenfernie rose and paced the room. Coming to one of the narrow windows, he stood and looked out and down upon bank and brae and wood and field and moor. He returned to the table. ”I'll tell you about it.”
He told. Ian sat and listened. The light played about him, shook gold dots and lines over his green coat, over his hands, his faintly smiling face, his head held straight and high. He was so well to look at, so ”magnificent”! Alexander spoke with the eloquence of a possessing pa.s.sion, and Ian listened and felt himself to be the sympathizing friend. Even the profound, unreasonable, unhumorous idealism of old Steadfast had its quaint, Utopian appeal. He was going to marry the farmer's granddaughter, though he might, undoubtedly, marry better.... Ian listened, questioned, summed up:
”I have always been the worldly-wise one! Is there any use in my talking now of worldly wisdom?”
”No use at all.”
”Then I won't!... Old Alexander the Great, are you happy?”
”If she gives me her love.”
Ian dismissed that with a wave of his hand. ”Oh, I think she'll give it, dear simpleton!” He looked at Glenfernie now with genial affection. ”Well, on the whole, and balancing one thing against another, I think that I want you to be happy!”
Alexander laughed at that minification. ”And my happiness is big enough--or if I get it it will be big enough--not in the least to disturb our friends.h.i.+p country, Ian!”
”I'll believe that, too. Our relations are old and rooted.”
”Old and rooted.”
”So I wish you joy.... And I remember when you thought you would not marry!”
”Oh--memories! I'm sweeping them away! I'm beginning again!... I hold fast the memory of friends.h.i.+p. I hold fast the memory that somehow, in this form or that, I must have loved her from the beginning of things!” He rose and moved about the room. Going to the fireplace, he leaned his forehead against the stone and looked down at the laid, not kindled, wood. He turned and came back to Ian. ”The world seems to me all good.”
Ian laughed at him, half in raillery, but half in a flood of kindness.
If what had stirred had been ancient betrayal, alive and vital one knew not when, now again it was dead, dead. He rose, he put his arm again about Alexander's shoulder. ”Glenfernie! Glenfernie! you're in deep! Well, I hope the world will stay heaven, e'en for your sake!”
They left the old room with its hauntings of a boy's search for gold, with, back of that, who might know what hauntings of ancient times and fortress doings, violences and agonies, subduings, revivings, cark and care and light struggling through, dark nights and waited-for dawns!
They went down the stair and out of the keep. Late June flamed around them.
Ian stayed another hour or two ere he rode back to Black Hill. With Glenfernie he went over Glenfernie House, the known, familiar rooms.
They went to the school-room together and out through the breach in the old castle wall, and sat among the pine roots, and looked down through leafy tree-tops to the glint of water. When, in the sun-washed house and narrow garden and gra.s.sy court, they came upon men and women they stopped and spoke, and all was friendly and merry as it should be in a land of good folk. Ian had his crack with Davie, with Eppie and Phemie and old Lauchlinson and others. They sat for a few minutes with Mrs. Grizel where, in a most housewifely corner, she measured currants and bargained with pickers of cherries. Strickland they came upon in the book-room. With the Jardines and this gentleman the sense of employed and employee had long ago pa.s.sed into a larger inclusion. He and the young laird talked and worked together as members of one family. Now there was some converse among the three, and then the two left Strickland in the cool, dusky room. Outside the house June flamed again. For a while they paced up and down under the trees in the narrow garden atop the craggy height. Then Ian mounted Fatima, who all these years was kept for him at Black Hill.
”You'll come over to-morrow?”
”Yes.”
Glenfernie watched him down the steep-descending, winding road, and thought of many roads that, good company, he and Ian had traveled together.