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hisweird in the Backwoods. He had been no scholar; but acertain imagination marked all his doings, and
of a Sun-day night he would come and talk to me of the North. The Picts were his special subject, and
his ideas were mad. "Listen to me," he would say, when I had mixedhim toddy and given him one of my
cigars; "I believethere are traces ay, and more than traces of an oldculture lurking in those hills and
waiting to be discov- ered. We never hear of the Picts being driven from thehills. The Britons drove them
from the lowlands, theGaels from Ireland did the same for the Britons; but the
164 John Buchan
hills were left unmolested. We hear of no one going nearthem except outlaws and tinklers. And in that
very placeyou have the strangest mythology. Take the story of the Brownie. What is that but the story of
a little swart manof uncommon strength and cleverness, who does good and ill indiscriminately, and then
disappears. There aremany scholars, as you yourself confess, who think thatthe origin of the Brownie
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was in some mad belief in the old race of the Picts, which still survived somewhere inthe hills. And do we
not hear of the Brownie in authentic records right down to the year 1756? After that, whenpeople grew
more incredulous, it is natural that the belief should have begun to die out; but I do not see why stray
traces should not have survived till late."
"Do you not see what that means?" I had said in mockgravity. "Those same hills are, if anything, less
knownnow than they were a hundred years ago. Why shouldnot your Picts or Brownies be living to this
day?"
"Why not, indeed?" he had rejoined, in all ser-iousness.
I laughed, and he went to his rooms and returned witha large leather-bound book. It was lettered, in the
rococostyle of a young man's taste, "Glimpses of the Unknown," and some of the said glimpses he
proceededto impart to me. It was not pleasant reading; indeed, I had rarely heard anything so well fitted
to shatter sensi-tive nerves. The early part consisted of folk-tales andfolk-sayings, some of them wholly
obscure, some of themwith a glint of meaning, but all of them with some hintof a mystery in the hills. I
heard the Brownie story incountless versions. Now the thing was a friendly littleman, who wore grey
breeches and lived on brose; nowhe was a twisted being, the sight of which made the ewesmiscarry in
the lambing-time. But the second part wasthe stranger, for it was made up of actual tales, most of them
with date and place appended. It was a most Bed-lamite catalogue of horrors, which, if true, made the
wholesome moors a place instinct with tragedy. Sometold of children carried away from villages, even
from towns, on the verge of the uplands. In almost every casethey were girls, and the strange fact was
their utter disap-pearance. Two little girls would be coming home from
NO MAN'S LAND 165
school, would be seen last by a neighbour just where theroad crossed a patch of heath or entered a
wood, andthen no human eye ever saw them again. Children'scries had startled outlying shepherds in
the night, andwhen they had rushed to the door they could hear noth-ing but the night wind. The instances
of such disappear-ances were not very common perhaps once in twenty years but they were
confined to this one tract of coun-try, and came in a sort of fixed progression from themiddle of last
century, when the record began. But thiswas only one side of the history. The latter part was alldevoted
to a chronicle of crimes which had gone unpun-ished, seeing that no hand had ever been traced. The list
was fuller in last century; in the earlier years of the pres-ent it had dwindled; then came a revival about the
'fif- ties; and now again in our own time it had sunk low. Atthe little cottage of Auchterbrean, on the
roadside in Glen Aller, a labourer's wife had been found pierced tothe heart. It was thought to be a case
of a woman'sjealousy, and her neighbour was accused, convicted, and hanged. The woman, to be sure,
denied the charge withher last breath; but circumstantial evidence seemed suffi-ciently strong against her.
Yet some people in the glen believed her guiltless. In particular, the carrier who hadfound the dead
woman declared that the way in which her neighbour received the news was a sufficient proofof [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]