Inchbracken: The Story of a Fama Clamosa

  Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided byGoogle Books (Oxford University)

  Transcriber's Notes:

  1. Page scan source: https://books.google.com/books?id=ATwVAAAAQAAJ

  2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].

  INCHBRACKEN

  INCHBRACKEN

  THE STORY OF A

  FAMA CLAMOSA

  BY

  ROBERT CLELAND

  * * * _NEW EDITION--ILLUSTRATED_ * * *

  GLASGOW: ROBERT FORRESTER, 1 ROYAL EXCHANGE SQUARE * * * 1887

  CONTENTS.

  CHAP.

  I.--The Parish Of Kilrundle.

  II.--A Storm.

  III.--The Find.

  IV.--Down By the Burnside.

  V.--Julia.

  VI.--Sophia.

  VII.--Joseph.

  VIII.--A Field Preaching.

  IX.--The Baby.

  X.--Tibbie.

  XI.--An Excursion.

  XII.--Inchbracken.

  XIII.--A Harbour of Refuge.

  XIV.--Scandal.

  XV.--Mary.

  XVI.--Man and Wife.

  XVII.--Roderick.

  XVIII.--The Delivery of a Letter.

  XIX.--Subornation of Perjury.

  XX.--In a Sick Room.

  XXI.--Circe.

  XXII.--In Session.

  XXIII.--Mother and Daughter.

  XXIV.--Luckie Howden.

  XXV.--Sophia's Answer.

  XXVI.--Fama Clamosa.

  XXVII.--Dealings in Love and Faithfulness.

  XXVIII.--More Faithfulness but Less Love.

  XXIX.--Consultation.

  XXX.--Tibbie's Troubles.

  XXXI.--A Catechist.

  XXXII.--Changes.

  XXXIII.--Discomfited.

  XXXIV.--'Wooed an' Married an a'.'

  XXXV.--Found.

  XXXVI.--Augustus Wallowby.

  XXXVII.--The End.

  INCHBRACKEN.

  CHAPTER I.

  _THE PARISH OF KILRUNDLE_.

  The night was stormy and black as pitch. Sheets of chilling rain spedlashing across the glen, driven by the whirling tempest. The burns inthe hills, swollen into torrents, came tumbling down their rocky bedsall foam and uproar, diffusing through the air an undertone ofcontinuous thunder, that could be distinctly heard in each recurringinterval of the gale. Along the road which traversed the clachan ofGlen Effick and then wandered up the glen and across the hills, theelements had free scope to work their evil will, and nothing with lifedared venture forth to oppose them. The air was full of hissings androarings and crackings and rumblings, as trees and roofs swayed andshivered to the blast, and the loosened stones rumbled in the beds ofneighbouring torrents. The drowsy lights from the inn door and thepost-office disclosed nothing but a sheet of falling rain and anoverflowing gutter, and the gleams from the round boles in the cottageshutters were but shining bars across the thick darkness of the night.The two bright lamps of the stage coach from Inverlyon, descending thehill road from the east, glowed like the fierce eyes of some monsterof the night, and disclosed something of the scene as they passedalong, trees tossing and writhing in the wind, wayside burns brokeloose from their bounds and foaming across the road, and for therest,--slop, slush, and blackness. Within, the tumult out of doorsgave edge to the glow and comfort of the snug peat fire on the hearth.The wind, rumbling in the rocking chimney, and occasional raindropshissing on the embers, seemed but to call forth a ruddier light fromthat goodly pile of burning peat and peeled coppice oak. True thehearth was but clay, and of clay too was the floor of the apartment,but the flicker and play of the flames hid the one as effectually asthe comfortable Brussels carpet concealed the other. The whitewashedcottage walls, as well as some outlying yards of carpet, were coveredby bookcases whose tops touched the low ceiling, and big books piledand heaped one on the other as they best might be to save space.

  This sombre background was somewhat relieved by the glints of thefirelight on a few gilt picture frames containing portraits, and by afew steel engravings built curiously in among the books. Those dearold engravings, which forty years ago embellished every middle classhome in Scotland,--John Knox preaching, Queen Mary at Leith after SirWilliam Allan, and Duncan's stirring memorials of Prince Charlie--theywere good wholesome art for every day life, and likely to stir thechildren's hearts, as did the ballads sung round the hearths of anearlier generation, to an honest love of the brave and the beautiful,and a sturdy pride in their Scottish birth. We have higher artnow-a-days, or we think so. We spend more money on it; and if not morediscriminative, are at least greatly more critical; but is the moralinfluence of our walls on our households better now than it was then?The boys and girls of to-day will grow up less narrow. Will they be asloyal and true-hearted?

  But to return to the study of the Reverend Roderick Brown, licentiateof the Free Church of Scotland. On the window-shelf were pots of hardyroses in luxuriant bloom, and in the distant corner stood a tallcrimson cloth screen of many leaves, behind which were concealed thebed and toilette appurtenances of his reverence the licentiate. Beyondthis a door communicated with an inner room; but here there are signsunmistakable of a lady's chamber, so we may not intrude.

  Drawn up before the fire there stands a large writing-table, on whichare books and much manuscript, and at one end sits the occupant, deepin the composition of one of the five or six discourses he will beexpected to deliver in the course of the following week. A tall youngman under thirty, well-proportioned and even athletic, but pale andthin, and rather worn as regards the face. The straight black hairwhich he has tossed back from his face in the throes of composition,displays a forehead pale, blue-veined, and high, but rather narrow,eyes dark and deep-set, beneath shaggy brows, in hollow andblue-rimmed sockets, as of one who has gone through much excitementand fatigue, but burning with a steady fire of enthusiasm, which seemsas if it would never go out, so long as a drop of the oil of liferemains in the lamp to supply it with fuel. The mouth is long andflexible, not without signs of firmness and vigor, but gentle andserene, a smile appearing to lurk in one of the corners, as awaitingits opportunity to break forth. The whole expression is pure andunworldly. An observer must have said, that, whether or not he mightbe wise and prudent, he did not look like a fool, and he was mostassuredly good.

  His sister Mary sits opposite him plying her needle, and crooning toherself some scraps of old world song, but softly, so as not todisturb the flow of the minister's thoughts. She is younger by someyears than her brother, tall like him, and with all the grace inrepose that comes of well-exercised and symmetrical limbs. The head issmall, with a wealth of golden brown hair wound tightly round it, faceoval and fair, with the complexion of a shell The eyelids are veryfull, drooping and long-lashed, and beneath them the eyes look forthlike violets from the shade. The hands are large and firm, but white,supple, and perfectly shaped, and it is a treat and a joy to watch heras she sits at work. She seems to exhale the breath of violets,suggested perhaps by the colour of her eyes, as one follows hertranquil m
ovements, like Shelley's hyacinth bells--

  'Which rang with a music so soft and intense That it passed for an odor within the sense.'

  The varying light of the fire, shining warmly upon her, touches eventhe folds of her black gown into a subdued repetition of the quiveringglories that flicker among her hair.

  Those were the _disruption times_, which all have heard of, and themiddle-aged among us can recall more or less vividly. Times sodifferent from the present! When we look back on them, knowing howmuch there was that was narrow, rugged, and unlovely, we must stillfeel a regretful admiration for an atmosphere of earnestness and moreheroic warmth of feeling than is now attainable to the cold-bloodedclear-sightedness and electric dispassionateness of the criticalspirit now prevalent, which admits good and detects shortcoming in allvarieties of faith and opinion alike, and so, leaves the seeker afterthe better to follow the worse in pure weariness, satisfied in the endto pursue material advantage, seeing that Truth and Goodness havebecome abstractions, too high to be attained, or else too widelydiffused to be missed, in whatever direction the wayfarer may stray.

  In those days the seeker after the goodly pearl of truth, feltconstrained to forsake all and followed it; and doubtless theforsaking and the quest brought a moral benefit, though it by no meansfollows that the form in which they sought it, the Ultramontane fetishof ecclesiastical supremacy--exemption from State interference,combined with an unlimited right to meddle in the State--was in anysense a truth at all. An earnest following out of the supposed truthcannot but be wholesome to the seeker, and to fight for an idea of anykind, must be good in materialistic times.

  One is led to use the word 'Ultramontane' in connection with the FreeChurch 'movement,' by the curious resemblance between the claims ofthese ardent Presbyterians, and those of the Ultramontane section ofthe Catholic Church, as well as by the very similar language in whichboth expressed and supported them. It would seem indeed as if since1840 a wave of turbulence had passed over the minds of all Churchmen,beginning in this Northern Kingdom and rolling Southwards. England andIreland have since then been disturbed by unruly priests, and the longpontificate of Pius IX. has witnessed in every country a continuedeffort of the Spiritual Estate to assert itself against secularauthority.

  That the struggle in Scotland was for no absolute truth, would appearfrom the change of front which the body that then arose now presents.It commenced by claiming to have inherited the rights of thehistorical church, confirmed by act of parliament, to guide the nationand the state in questions of faith and morals. Now it places itselfwith the voluntary religious associations, and clamours for deprivingits own successors of the endowments which its members themselvesresigned because of conditions which now do not exist. When Chalmers,ten years before the Disruption, fought the battle of Establishmentsagainst Voluntaryism, not only in Scotland, but in England also, helittle thought that the Church he was to found, would, in a quarter ofa century, become the hottest association of voluntaries in thecountry! New circumstances have begotten new 'principles,' let us say,for it would not be well to impute anything like trade jealousy toholy men.

  Roderick Brown was pursuing his theological studies in Edinburgh,during the years of theological excitement which preceded thecatastrophe. Youth is sympathetic, and the leaders of the movement hadholy names and historic memories to conjure with. It is not wonderful,therefore, that he caught the enthusiasm of the men about him, andthirsted to bear his part in contending for the truth. At eachsucceeding vacation he returned to his father's manse with aheightened ardour for ecclesiastical combat; and many and long weretheir discussions on the Church question and its new lights. To theyoung man's surprise, he found his arguments fall rather flat andpointless in presence of his father's calm and dispassionatestatements of the case; but the elder found the wisdom andunderstanding gathered in sixty years' intercourse with the Church andthe world equally powerless to cool down the heat and ardour of theenthusiastic youth. Therefore, as must ever be the case whereaffection and respect are combined with common sense, they finallyagreed to differ, each forbearing to insist on his own preferences,and confident that the other sought only the right according to hislights.

  The disappointment to Doctor Brown was not slight. He felt himselfrapidly failing, and he had hoped to find in his son an assistant andsuccessor in whose hands he might contentedly leave the care of hisbeloved flock, and pass on to an uninterrupted fulfilment the manygood works he had commenced in his parish. Besides his parish, thefuture of his daughter may also have weighed much on the old man'smind. She had been born and bred in the manse, and was as well knownto every one of the parishioners, as the minister himself. To the poorshe had been the recognised messenger of mercy. Ever since hermother's death (when she was thirteen), had devolved on her with theassistance of the old housekeeper, the many and onerous duties thatfall to the country minister's wife; and in fulfilling these she hadwon the love of rich and poor alike.

  Roderick too had been bred in the manse, and was known to every livingsoul in the parish. He had fished the burns with the sons of thefarmers and crofters, when a lad, and as he grew older shot on themoors with the lairds. Gentle and simple alike had only kind words tosay of the minister's son, and to these was added sincere respect whenhe entered on his theological studies, and afforded such assistance tohis father in his sacred duties as the laws of the Church permit tothe unordained. There would have been but one voice in the parish fromPatron, Heritors, and People, as to who should succeed Doctor Brown inhis charge, and it was very bitter to the old man to find that for anenthusiastic scruple all his hopes were to be laid low.

  In the year of the Disruption, Dr. Brown died, and in the same yearhis son Roderick was licensed to preach by the Free Church. On manytherefore fell a double bereavement; his father was taken away, andforthwith it became necessary to gather up his household gods, therelics of his past, steeped in all the memories of childhood and ofthose who had made it glad, and to move forth into a new and anuntried life.

  General Drysdale, the patron and chief heritor of the parish, astaunch Conservative in Church and State, was greatly disappointed atthe step taken by the son of his old friend, in quitting the church ofhis father. He would gladly have presented him to the living, and feltpersonally aggrieved that he had deliberately incapacitated himselffrom accepting it. The late minister had been his frequent guest atInchbracken, and the intercourse between the families of the greathouse and the manse had been constant and cordial, and had formed amost useful bond of connection between the laird and his poorertenants; but now, owing to the wrongheadedness of an inexperiencedyouth, all this must cease, and who could tell how the new incumbentwould answer? The breeding of himself and his family might make theirpresence unacceptable at the castle, and in that case intercoursewould necessarily cease, and the laird and his people, in consequence,would drift apart from want of the old link; or even should the newcomer answer, it would be long before a stranger could establish tiesbetween himself and the different orders of his flock, and longerstill before he could become a bond between one order and another.

  But even this did not make up the whole sum of Roderick's offences.His personal merits themselves added another count to the General'sindictment against him. Beloved by rich and poor, his religiousministrations were greatly valued in his native parish, and many whomight in other circumstances have stood staunch by the Kirk and thelaird, were seduced into dissent by his insidious exhortations. Notonly had he refused to accept the legitimate cure of souls, but he hadraised the standard of rebellion within the bounds, thereby tending tosubvert the wisely-appointed order of things, and contributing to theinletting of that free tide of revolutionary democracy which theGeneral espied afar as doomed eventually to sweep away lairds and allother salutary potentates, and lead on to levelling ideas, theabomination of desolation, and the end of the world. Clearly, then, itwas the duty of every well-regulated mind to discountenance suchdoings; and in the interest of public order, and for
the sake of hismisguided tenantry, General Drysdale's duty to refuse ground for theerection of a schismatic meetinghouse--a temple of discord, upon anyportion of his and; or to rent a dwelling to the missionary ofrebellion and error.

  Roderick therefore being unable to find shelter for himself and hissister within five miles of the church and manse of Kilrundle, betookhimself to the neighbouring hamlet of Glen Effick, which was beyondthe territory of this well-meaning persecutor, but still hovered onthe edge of Kilrundle Parish, over which he could raid at will, andhold meetings on the hillside for the faithful of the flock, whogathered in ever increasing crowds to hear him, emulous of the 'HillFolk' of old, who, as they were often reminded, 'held not their livesdear, but went forth to serve the Lord in the wilderness.'

  Almost all the cottars in Glen Effick would have been proud to receivethe minister and his sister, but their means were less than theirdesires. The cottages were but small, and a few vacant rooms,scattered here and there throughout the village, were all that couldbe offered to shelter them and their effects. Hence in one cottage hehad his books and made his study, and in this also they both slept. Inanother, across the road, they took their meals, and had bestowed suchof their goods as were in use for that purpose. In a third was Mary'spiano and many of her belongings, and there they would probably havespent their evenings, but that an old body, with more zeal than spaceat her disposal, had insisted on bestowing their tea equipage in hercorner cupboard, where it was visible through the glass door, andproved her a mother in Israel. Thither they felt bound to follow itoccasionally, that so Luckie Howden might have the glory of making teafor the minister.

  All this was very tiresome to Mary, and sometimes she thought herpatience would break down entirely. During her peaceful and happy lifewith her father she had imbibed all his ideas. She still clung to theEstablished Church as her head, and disapproving of the Disruption,she had neither zeal for the cause, nor a pleasing sense of martyrdomto mitigate the worries, discomforts, and privations of her dailylife. The one only solace of her lot was her great love for herbrother, from whom she had resolved never to part, and with whom shewas prepared to endure even greater hardships. An uncle had pressedher strongly to make her home with him, but she could not tear herselffrom Roderick, and so stayed on.