A REPUTATION

       Table of Contents

      I

      It was at a little lonely shooting-box in the Forest of Rhynns that I first met Layden, sometime in the process of a wet August. The place belonged to his cousin Urquhart, a strange man well on in years who divided his time between recondite sport and mild antiquities. We were a small party of men held together by the shifty acquaintance of those who meet somewhere and somehow each autumn. By day we shot conscientiously over mossy hills or fished in the many turbid waters; while of an evening there would be much tobacco and sporting-talk interspersed with the sleepy, indifferent joking of wearied men. We all knew the life well from long experience, and for the sake of a certain freshness and excitement were content to put up with monotonous fare and the companionship of bleak moorlands. It was a season of brown faces and rude health, when a man’s clothes smelt of peat, and he recked not of letters accumulating in the nearest post-town.

      To such sombre days Layden came like a phoenix among moor-fowl. I had arrived late, and my first sight of him was at dinner, where the usual listless talk was spurred almost to brilliance by his presence. He kept all the table laughing at his comical stories and quaint notes on men and things, shrewd, witty, and well-timed. But this welcome vivacity was not all, for he cunningly assumed the air of a wise man unbending, and his most random saying had the piquant hint of a great capacity. Nor was his talk without a certain body, for when by any chance one of his hearers touched upon some matter of technical knowledge, he was ready at the word for a well-informed discussion. The meal ended, as it rarely did, in a full flow of conversation, and men rose with the feeling of having returned for the moment to some measure of culture.

      The others came out one by one to the lawn above the river, while he went off with his host on some private business. George Winterham sat down beside me and blew solemn wreaths of smoke toward the sky. I asked him who was the man, and it is a sign of the impression made that George gave me his name without a request for further specification.

      “That’s a deuced clever chap,” he said with emphasis, stroking a wearied leg.

      “Who is he?” I asked.

      “Don’t know,—cousin of Urquhart’s. Rising man, they say, and I don’t wonder. I bet that fellow is at the top before he dies.”

      “Is he keen on shooting?” I asked, for it was the usual question.

      Not much, George thought. You could never expect a man like that to be good in the same way as fools like himself; they had better things to think about. After all, what were grouse and salmon but vanities, and the killing of them futility? said Mr. Winterham, by way of blaspheming his idols.

      “I was writing to my sister, Lady Clanroyden, you know,” he went on, “and I mentioned that a chap of the name of Layden was coming. And here she writes to me to-day and can speak about nothing but the man. She says that the Cravens have taken him up, and that he is going to marry the rich Miss Clavering, and that the Prime Minister said to somebody that he would be dashed if this chap wasn’t the best they had. Where the deuce did I leave Mabel’s letter?” And George went indoors upon the quest.

      Shortly after Layden came out, and soon we all sat watching the dusk gather over miles of spongy moor and vague tangled birchwoods. It is hard for one who is clearly the sole representative of light amid barbarism to escape from a certain seeming of pedantry and a walk aloof and apart. I watched the man carefully, for he fascinated me, and if I had admired his nimble wits at dinner, the more now did I admire his tact. By some cunning art he drove out all trace of superiority from his air; he was the ordinary good fellow, dull, weary like the rest, vastly relishing tobacco, and staring with vacant eyes to the evening.

      The last day of my visit to the Forest I have some occasion to remember. It was marked by a display of weather, which I, who am something of a connoisseur in the thing, have never seen approached in this land or elsewhere. The morning had been hazy and damp, with mist over the hill-tops and the air lifeless. But about mid-day a wind came out of the southwest which sent the vapour flying, and left the tops bald and distant. We had been shooting over the Cauldshaw Head, and about five in the afternoon landed on a spur of the Little Muneraw above the tarn which they call the Loch o’ the Threshes. Thence one sees a great prospect of wild country, with birchwoods like smoke and sudden rifts which are the glens of streams. On this afternoon the air was cool and fine, the sky a level grey, the water like ink beneath dull-gleaming crags. But the bare details were but a hundredth part of the scene; for over all hung an air of silence, deep, calm, impenetrable,—the quiet distilled of the endless moors, the grey heavens, the primeval desert. It was the incarnate mystery of Life, for in that utter loneliness lay the tale of ages since the world’s birth, the song of being and death as uttered by wild living things since the rocks had form. The sight had the glamour of a witch’s chant; it cried aloud for recognition, driving from the heart all other loves and fervours, and touching the savage elemental springs of desire.

      We sat in scattered places on the hillside, all gazing our fill of the wild prospect, even the keepers, to whom it was a matter of daily repetition. None spoke, for none had the gift of words; only in each mind was the same dumb and unattainable longing. Then Layden began to talk, and we listened. In another it would have been mere impertinence, for another would have prated and fallen into easy rhetoric; but this man had the art of speech, and his words were few and chosen. In a second he was done, but all had heard and were satisfied; for he had told the old tale of the tent by the running water and the twin candle- stars in heaven, of morning and evening under the sky and the whole lust of the gipsy life. Every man there had seen a thousand fold more of the very thing he spoke of, had gone to the heart of savagery, pioneering in the Himalayas, shooting in the Rockies, or bearing the heat of tropical sport. And yet this slim townsman, who could not shoot straight, to whom Scots hills were a revelation of the immense, and who was in his proper element on a London pavement,—this man could read the sentiment so that every hearer’s heart went out to answer.

      As we went home I saw by his white face that he was overtired, and he questioned me irritably about the forwarding of letters. So there and then I prayed Heaven for the gift of speech, which makes a careless spectator the interpreter of voiceless passion.

      II

      Three years later I found myself in England, a bronzed barbarian fresh from wild life in north Finland, and glad of a change to the pleasant domesticity of home. It was early spring, and I drifted to my cousin’s house of Heston, after the aimless fashion of the wanderer returned. Heston is a pleasant place to stay in at all times, but pleasantest in spring, for it stands on the last ridge of a Devon moor, whence rolls a wide land of wood and meadow to a faint blue line of sea. The hedgerows were already bursting into leaf, and brimming waters slipped through fresh green grasses. All things were fragrant of homeland and the peace of centuries.

      At Heston I met my excellent friend Wratislaw, a crabbed, cynical, hard- working, and sore-battered man, whose excursions in high politics had not soothed his temper. His whole life was a perpetual effort to make himself understood, and as he had started with somewhat difficult theories his recognition had been slow.