John Buchan

Grey Weather John Buchan

"... Nullum Sacra caput Proserpina fugit."A NOISELESS evening fell chill and dank on the moorlands. The Dreichil was mist to thevery rim of its precipitous face, and the long, dun sides of the Little Muneraw faded intogrey vapour. Underfoot were plashy moss and dripping heather, and all the air was chokedwith autumnal heaviness. The herd of the Lanely Bield stumbled wearily homeward in this, the late afternoon, with the roof-tree of his cottage to guide him over the waste. For weeks, months, he had been ill, fighting the battle of a lonely sickness. Two years agonehis wife had died, and as there had been no child, he was left to fend for himself. He had noneed for any woman, he declared, for his wants were few and his means of the scantiest, sohe had cooked his own meals and done his own household work since the day he had stoodby the grave in the Gledsmuir kirkyard. And for a little he did well; and then, inch by inch, trouble crept upon him. He would come home late in the winter nights, soaked to the skin, and sit in the peat-reek till his clothes dried on his body. The countless little ways in whicha woman's hand makes a place healthy and habitable were unknown to him, and soon hebegan to pay the price of his folly. For he was not a strong man, though a careless onlookermight have guessed the opposite from his mighty frame. His folk had all been short-lived, and already his was the age of his father at his death. Such a fact might have warned him tocircumspection; but he took little heed till that night in the March before, when, coming upthe Little Muneraw and breathing hard, a chill wind on the summit cut him to the bone. Herose the next morn, shaking like a leaf, and then for weeks he lay ill in bed, while a youngershepherd from the next sheep- farm did his work on the hill. In the early summer he rose abroken man, without strength or nerve, and always oppressed with an ominous sinking inthe chest; but he toiled through his duties, and told no man his sorrow. The summer wasparchingly hot, and the hillsides grew brown and dry as ashes. Often as he laboured up theinterminable ridges, he found himself sickening at heart with a poignant regret. These werethe places where once he had strode so freely with the crisp air cool on his forehead. Nowhe had no eye for the pastoral loveliness, no ear for the witch-song of the desert. When hereached a summit, it was only to fall panting, and when he came home at nightfall he sankwearily on a s