“Who speaks of the Spoonbills?” said the man who had first welcomed the traveller. “We bain’t no alehouse prattlers. What Mas’r Midwinter wants us to know I reckon he’ll tell us open and neighbourly. Think you he’ll make music the night?”
“He’s had his supper the best part of an hour, and then he’ll take tobacco. After that happen he’ll gie us a tune.”
The speaker had looked over his shoulder, and the traveller, following his glance, became aware that close on the edge of the thicket a small tent was pitched. The night had fallen thick and moonless, but the firelight, wavering in the wind, showed it as a grey patch against the gloom of the covert. As the conversation droned on, that patch held his eyes like a magnet. There was a man there, someone with the strange name of Midwinter, someone whom these moor-men held in reverence. The young man had the appetite of his race for mysteries, and his errand had keyed him to a mood of eager inquiry. He looked at the blur which was the tent as a terrier watches a badger’s earth.
The talk round the fire had grown boisterous, for someone had told a tale which woke deep rumbling laughter. Suddenly it was hushed, for the thin high note of a violin cleft the air like an arrow.
The sound was muffled by the tent-cloth, but none the less it dominated and filled that lonely place. The traveller had a receptive ear for music and had heard many varieties in his recent wanderings, from the operas of Rome and Paris to gypsy dances in wild glens of Apennine and Pyrenees. But this fiddling was a new experience, for it obeyed no law, but jigged and wailed and chuckled like a gale in an old house. It seemed to be a symphony of the noises of the moor, where unearthly birds sang duets with winds from the back of beyond. It stirred him strangely. His own bagpipes could bring tears to his eyes with memory of things dear and familiar; but this quickened his blood, like a voice from a far world.
The group by the fire listened stolidly with their heads sunk, but the young man kept his eyes on the tent. Presently the music ceased, and from the flap a figure emerged with the fiddle in its hand. The others rose to their feet, and remained standing till the musician had taken a seat at the other side of the fire from the traveller. “Welcome, Mas’r Midwinter,” was the general greeting, and one of them told him the story of Tom Heather and their guest.
The young man by craning his neck could see the new figure clear in the glow of the embers. He made out a short man of an immense breadth of shoulder, whose long arms must have reached well below his knees. He had a large square face, tanned to the colour of bark, and of a most surprising ugliness, for his nose was broken in the middle, and one cheek and the corner of one eye were puckered with an old scar. Chin and lips were shaven, and the wide mouth showed white regular teeth. His garments seemed to be of leather like the others, but he wore a cravat, and his hair, though unpowdered, was neatly tied.
He was looking at the traveller and, catching his eye, he bowed and smiled pleasantly.
“You have found but a rough lodging, Mr.—” he said, with the lift of interrogation in his voice.
“Andrew Watson they call me. A merchant of Newcastle, sir, journeying Bristol-wards on a matter of business.” The formula, which had sounded well enough hitherto, now seemed inept, and he spoke it with less assurance.
The fiddler laughed. “That is for change-houses. Among friends you will doubtless tell another tale. For how comes a merchant of the North country to be so far from a high road? Shall I read the riddle, sir?”
He took up his violin and played very low and sweetly a Border lilt called “The Waukin’ o’ the Fauld.” The young man listened with interest, but his face did not reveal what the musician sought. The latter tried again, this time the tune called “Colin’s Cattle,” which was made by the fairies and was hummed everywhere north of Forth. Bright eyes read the young man’s face. “I touch you,” the fiddler said, “but not closely.”
For a moment he seemed to consider, and then drew from his instrument a slow dirge, with the rain in it and the west wind and the surge of forlorn seas. It was that lament which in all the country from Mull to Moidart is the begetter of long thoughts. He played it like a master, making his fiddle weep and brood and exult in turn, and he ended with a fantastic variation so bitter with pain that the young man, hearing his ancestral melody in this foreign land, cried out in amazement.
The musician lowered his violin, smiling. “This time,” he said, “I touch you at the heart. Now I know you. You have nothing to fear among the moor-men of the Seven Towns. Take your ease, Alastair Maclean, among friends.”
The traveller, thus unexpectedly unveiled, could find no words for his astonishment.
“Are you of the honest party?” he stammered, more in awe than in anxiety.
“I am of no party. Ask the moor-men if the Spoonbills trouble their heads with Governments?”
The answer from the circle was a laugh.
“Who are you, then, that watches thus the comings and goings of travellers?”
“I am nothing—a will-o’-the-wisp at your service—a clod of vivified dust whom its progenitors christened Amos Midwinter. I have no possession but my name, and no calling but that of philosopher. Naked I came from the earth, and naked I will return to it.”
He plucked with a finger at the fiddle-strings, and evoked
