Midwinter quotes

An October gale was tossing the boughs and whirling the dead bracken, and a cold rain was beginning. Ill weather was nothing to one nourished among Hebridean northwesters, but he cursed a land in which there were no landmarks.

A hilltop, a glimpse of sea or loch, even a stone on a ridge, were things a man could steer by, but what was he to do in this unfeatured woodland?

These soft south-country folk stuck to their roads, and the roads were forbidden him.

“

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.”

“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.

”

“Nay, it explains all.

There is an Old England which has outlived Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman and will outlast the Hanoverian.

It has seen priest turn to presbyter and presbyter to parson and has only smiled. It is the land of the edge of moorlands and the rims of forests and the twilight before dawn, and strange knowledge still dwells in it.

I am gentle born, as you guess, and have been in my day scholar and soldier, but now my companions are the moor-men and the purley-men and the hill-shepherds and the raggle-taggle gypsies. And I am wholly content, for my calling is philosophy.

I stand aside in life, and strike no blows and make no bargain, but I learn that which is hid from others.

”

… the ordered amenities of such a mansion as this—the decent town at the gates richer than a city of Scotland, the acres of policies that warded the house from the vulgar eye, the secular trees, the air of long-descended peace—struck a chill to his hopes.

What did a kestrel in the home of peacocks?

At the summit of the hill the road passed beneath an archway into a courtyard; but here masons were at work and Alastair turned to the left, in doubt about the proper entrance.

Mr. Kyd had contented himself with a flowered waistcoat, a plum-coloured coat and saffron stockings. Only the host was in sad colours, and, as he alone wore his natural hair, he presented a meagre and dejected figure in the flamboyant company.

The Duchess talked like a brook.

“Harry must show you the Vandykes,” she told Mr. Murray. “He knows the age and tale of everyone as I know my boys’ birthdays. I wish he would sell them, for they make me feel small and dingy. Look at them!

Then to complete the comedy the catch he had heard on Otmoor began to run in Alastair’s head. “Three naked men we be”—a far cry from this bedecked and cosseted assemblage. He had a moment of suffocation, until he regained his humour.

They were all naked under their fine clothes, and for one of them it was his business to do the stripping.

He caught Lord Cornbury’s eye and marked its gentle sadness. Was such a man content? Had he the assurance in his soul to listen to one who brought to him not peace but swords?

“La, sir,” she cried, “you are ungallant. That is very much my own age, and the world does not call me matronly.

I had thought you a courtier, but I fear⁠—I gravely fear⁠—you are an honest man.

”

If you win, the malcontents, who are the great majority, will join you, and His Royal Highness will sit on the throne of his fathers. If you fail, there is no loss except to yourselves, for the others are not pledged.

Statesmanship, sir, is an inglorious thing, for it must consider first the fortunes of the common people.

No statesman has a right to risk these fortunes unless he be reasonably assured of success. Therefore I say to you that England must wait, and statesmen must wait with England, till the issue is decided. That issue still lies with the soldiers.

“I am of your lordship’s opinion,” Mr. Kyd observed with a jolly laugh. “

Let a romantic maid indulge her fancy and choose her own way of wedlock, for if she get not romance at the start she will not find it in the dreich business of matrimony.

But you and me, my lord, are bachelors and speak only from hearsay.”

Even as he spoke inward laughter consumed him. He, a follower of the Prince, was taking pains that certain troops should reach Wade, the Prince’s enemy. Yet he could not act otherwise, for the camaraderie of his profession constrained him.

The power of the armed over the unarmed was in that moment notably exemplified.

There was grumbling, a curse or two, and sullen faces, but no attempt was made to rush that corner where stood an active young man with an ugly sword.

“I love to bandy such civilities,” said the combatant. “I was taught to use my hands by my uncle Andrew, who used to keep the ring at Smithfields.

We praise the arts of peace, but the keenest pleasure of mankind is in battles.

You, sir, follow the profession of arms. Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.”

“I was taught to use my hands by my uncle Andrew, who used to keep the ring at Smithfields. We praise the arts of peace, but the keenest pleasure of mankind is in battles. You, sir, follow the profession of arms.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.

”

The more the young man looked at the weak heavy-lidded eyes and the massive face, the more he fell under their spell.

The appearance was like a Moorish palace⁠—outside, a bleak wall which had yet a promise of a treasure-house within.

“What of your errand?” he asked. “When we last parted you were in quest of a runaway lady.”

Midwinter nodded. “

Children are free of it, but their elders must earn admission.

It is a safe land—at any rate it is secure from common perils.”

“You are clad as a man should be for Old England, and you have the legs for the road we travel. We do not ride, for we go where no horse can go.

Put not your trust in horses, saith the Scriptures, which I take to mean that a man in the last resort should depend on his own shanks.

Boot and spur must stick to the paths, and the paths are but a tiny bit of England. How sits the wind? North by east? There is snow coming, but not in the next thirty hours, and if it comes, it will not stay us.

“Whose was the house?” Alastair asked, and was told—

“We name no names in Old England.”

The second day was to Alastair like the first for joy in the movement of travel, but the weather had grown bitterly cold and unfallen snow was heavy in the leaden sky.

“And for men?” Alastair asked.

“For men port, and for heroes brandy.”

“Nay, sir,” he said solemnly. “Brandy on the unheroic, such as I confess myself to be, produces too soon and certainly the effect of drunkenness.

“I think I have heard these boasts before, sir. When a man decries civility and exalts barbarism, it is because he is ill fitted to excel in good society. So when one praises rusticity it is because he is denied the joys of town.

A man may be tired of the country, but when he is tired of London he is tired of life.

”

“Mountains!” he cried, “I deny any grandeur in the spectacle.

There is more emotion for me in a furlong of Cheapside than in the contemplation of mere elevated bodies.

”

“Do you know my purpose, Mr. Maclean? So far as the Almighty permits me,

I will save the pigeon from the crow.

The pigeon will be hindered from meddling in matters of Government, his estate will be saved to him, and the crow, please God, will be plucked. Do you commend my policy?”

“That’s the deepest pothole in all the land,” he said, “and John like a scaly serpent lies coiled at the foot of it.

Nothing that goes in there comes out⁠—leastways only in threads and buttons by way of Eldingill, and that long after.

There’s your bed made for you, master, and it’s Ben’s duty to tuck you in. Oh, Ben’s a kind mammy.”

I have whispered it in his great ear, and he has purred happily like a cat. Think you I would disappoint John? Do not fear, pretty sir.

It is midwinter and the world is cold, and full of hard folks and wan cheeks and pinched bellies.

But down with John there is deep sleep and it is sunny and warm, for the fires of Hell burn next door. Nay, nay, John is not the Devil, but only a cousin on the spindle side.”

It was the entrance of a great man to a company where he expects to be acclaimed, for there was self-consciousness in the primness of his mouth. He lifted his genial eyes and saw Alastair.

The man was a superb actor, for though Alastair was watching him like a hawk he could see no start of surprise, no flicker of disappointment or fear.

“Captain Maclean, upon my soul!” he cried. “And who would have expected it? Man, I did not know you were acquaint here. But ’tis a joyful meeting, my dear sir, and I’m felix opportunitate coenae the day.”

I venture to observe that it’s strange conduct between gentlemen of the same nation. What’s the meaning of it, sir?” He pushed back his chair, and looked squarely at the young man.

“The meaning of it is that Judas has come to judgment.”

Kyd laughed, with an excellent semblance of mirth, and indeed he felt relieved. This was a mere random general charge, for which he could readily invent a defence. “Oh, sits the wind that airt?

Johnson’s face did not change. “

Sir, all men are liars,

” he said. “I strive to make you speak truth to your own soul. The death of Sir John is intended merely to save the lady from the pain of disgrace? On your honour, for no other purpose?”

For his world had been tumbled down, and all the castles he had built.

He had always been homeless, but now he was a thousandfold more an outlaw, for the one thing on earth he desired was behind him and not before him, and he was fleeing from hope.

In the afternoon the rain descended again and the road passed over a wide heath, which had been blackened by some autumn fire so that the shores of its leaden pools were like charcoal, and skeleton coverts shook their charred branches in the wind.

Alastair returned his sword to its sheath.

“I purpose to save your life,” he said, “and if God be merciful, your soul.”

He stripped off his riding-coat. “Take this,” he said. “It is wintry weather, and may serve till your own garments are dry. It is ill talking unclad, Sir John, and we have much to say to each other.”

They wore the Macdonald tartan, and the familiar sight seemed to strip from Alastair’s eyes the last film of illusion.

So that was the end of the long song.

Gone the velvet and steel of a great crusade, the honourable hopes, the chivalry and the high adventure, and what was left was this furtive banditti slinking through the mud like the riffraff of a fair.

Gone the velvet and steel of a great crusade, the honourable hopes, the chivalry and the high adventure, and what was left was this furtive banditti slinking through the mud like the riffraff of a fair. …

It was too hideous to envisage, and the young man’s mind was mercifully dulled after the first shattering certainty.

Mechanically the three turned into the street.

Claudia’s face again filled his vision, the one face that in all his life had brought love into his bustling soldierly moods and moved his heart to impulses which aforetime he would have thought incredible.

Love had come to him and he had passed it by, but not without making sacrifice, for to the goddess he had offered his most cherished loyalties.

Now it was all behind him—but by God, he did not, he would not regret it. He had taken the only way, and if it had pleased Fate to sport cruelly with him, that was no fault of his.

Midwinter moved into the firelight, with a crooked smile on his broad face. “We be three men in like case,” he said. “Nakedness has its merits and its faults.

A naked man travels fast and light, for he has nothing that he can lose, and his mind is free from cares, so that it is better swept and garnished for the reception of wisdom.

But if he be naked he is also defenceless, and the shod feet of the world can hurt him. You have been sore trampled on, sirs. One has lost a lady whom he loved as a father, and the other a mistress and a Cause.

“Nay, that I do not permit.

In Scotland we strive on our own ground and in our own quarrel, and I would involve no Englishman in what is condemned to defeat.

You have not our sentiments, sir, and you shall not share our disasters. But I shall welcome your company to within sight of Ramoth-Gilead.”

Could you understand the Gaelic, or had I my fingers now on the chanter-reed, I could give it more fully. You in England must keep strictly to the high road, or flee to the woods—one or the other, for there is no third way.

We of the Highlands carry the woods with us to the high roads of life.

We are natives of both worlds, wherefore we need renounce neither. But my feet must tread the high road till my strength fails.”

“My dear young lady should by this time be across Trent. I take it that she is safe from all perils of the road in Her Grace’s carriage.” Then he took up a poker and stirred the logs. “

Clear eyes are for men an honourable possession, but they do not make for happiness.

I pray God that those of my darling child may to the end of a long life be happily blinded.”

He sprawled in his wooden chair, and the window which faced him revealed sundry rents in his small-clothes and the immense shabbiness of his coat.

Alastair on his bed watched the heavy pitted features, the blinking eyes, the perpetually twitching hands with a certainty that never in his days had he seen a man so uncouth or so wholly to be loved;

and, as he looked, he seemed to discern that in the broad brow and the noble head which was also to be revered.

He struggled with his skirts and after some difficulty drew from its sheath a heavy old-fashioned cut-and-thrust blade, of the broadsword type. With it he made a pass or two, and then brought it down in a sweep which narrowly missed the bedpost.

“Now am I armed against all enemies,” he cried, stamping his foot. “If Polyphemus comes, have at his eye,” and he lunged towards the window.

The mingled solemnity and triumph of his air checked Alastair’s laughter. “This place is somewhat confined for swordplay,” he said. “Put it up, and tell me where you discovered the relic.”

“Why no, sir.

In my own land, the gallows is reckoned an ornament to a pedigree, and it has been the end of many a promising slip of my own house.

Indeed it is not unlikely to be the end of me. But why do you ask the question?”