Witch Wood E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: John Buchan
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Witch Wood is a 1927 novel by the Scots author John Buchan, set in the Scottish Borders during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Leseprobe

Witch Wood

by

John Buchan

To the best of our knowledge, the text of this

work is in the “Public Domain”.

HOWEVER, copyright law varies in other countries, and the work may still be under

copyright in the country from which you are accessing this website. It is your

responsibility to check the applicable copyright laws in your country before

downloading this work.

Prologue

The Coming of the Minister

The Road to Calidon

Guests in Calidon Tower

The Faithful Servant

The Black Wood by Day

The Black Wood by Night

The First Blast

The Second Blast

Before Lammas

What the Moon Saw

The Minister Girds up His Loins

The Man with the Squint

White Magic

The Counterblast

Hallowmass

The Witch Hunt

Woodilee and Calidon

The Plague

The Sacrifice

The Judgment

The Going of the Minister

Epilogue

And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord . . . and removed all the idols that his fathers had made. . . . But the high places were not removed.

I KINGS XV 11–14

Prologue

Time, my grandfather used to say, stood still in that glen of his. But the truth of the saying did not survive his death, and the first daisies had scarcely withered on his grave before a new world was knocking at the gate. That was thirty years ago, and to-day the revolution is complete. The parish name has been changed; the white box of a kirk which served the glen for more than two centuries has been rebuilt in red suburban gothic; a main railway line now runs down the Aller, and the excellent summer service brings holiday-makers from a hundred miles distant: houses and shops have clustered under the Hill of Deer; there may be found a well-reputed boarding school for youth, two inns — both of them reformed — a garage, and a bank agent. The centre of importance has moved from the old village to the new town by the station, and even the old village is no more a clachan of thatched roofs straggling by a burnside. Some enemy of the human race has taught the burn to run straight like a sewer, and has spanned it with a concrete bridge, while the thatch of the houses has been replaced by slates of a metallic green. Only the ruins of the old kirkton have not been meddled with; these stand as I remember them, knee-deep in docks and nettles, defended by a crumbling dry-stone dyke against inquisitive cattle from Crossbasket.

The old folk are gone, too, and their very names are passing from the countryside. Long before my day the Hawkshaws had disappeared from Calidon, but there was a respectable Edinburgh burgess family who had come there in the seventeenth century; now these have given place to a rawer burgess graft from the West. The farmers are mostly new men, and even the peasant, who should be the enduring stock, has shifted his slow bones. I learned from the postman that in Woodilee to-day there was no Monfries, no Sprot, but one Pennecuik, and only two bearers of the names of Ritchie and Shillinglaw, which had once been plentiful as ragwort. In such a renovated world it was idle to hope to find surviving the tales which had perplexed my childhood. No one could tell me when or why the kirk by the Crossbasket march became a ruin, and its gravestones lay buried in weeds. Most did not even know that it had been a kirk.

I was not greatly surprised by this, for the kirk of Woodilee had not been used for the better part of three centuries; and even as a child I could not find many to tell me of its last minister. The thing had sunk from a tale to an “owercome,” a form of words which every one knew but which few could interpret. It was Jess Blane, the grieve’s daughter, who first stirred my curiosity. In a whirl of wrath at some of my doings she prayed that the fate of the minister of Woodilee might be mine — a fate which she expounded as to be “claught by the Deil and awa’ wi’.” A little scared, I carried the affair to my nurse, who was gravely scandalized, and denounced Jess as a “shamefu’ tawpie, fyling the wean’s mind wi’ her black lees.” “Dinna you be feared, dearie,” she reassured me. “It wasna the Deil that cam’ for the minister o’ Woodilee. I’ve aye heard tell that he was a guid man and a kind man. It was the Fairies, hinny. And he leev’d happy wi’ them and dee’d happy, and never drank out o’ an empty cup.” I took my information, I remember, to the clan of children who were my playmates, and they spread it among their households and came back with confirmation or contradiction. Some held for the Devil, some for the Fairies — a proof that tradition spoke with two voices. The Fairy school slightly outnumbered the others, and in a battle one April evening close to the ruined kirk we routed the diabolists and established our version as the canon. But save for that solitary fact — that the minister of Woodilee had gone off with the Fairies — the canon remained bare.