Thomasina. Paul Gallico
of Glen Ardrath, one in which the picture was supplied by the overheated imagination reacting to the word ‘witch’ and the other was that she was a harmless woman who lived alone in a crofter’s cottage up in the hills where she made a living by weaving on a hand loom, conversed with birds and animals whom she nursed, mothered and fed, and communed with the angels and the Little Folk with which the glen was peopled.
Geordie was aware of both these tales. If it was true that the roe deer came down from the flanks of Ben Inver to feed out of her hand, the birds settled on her head and shoulders, the trout and salmon rose from the sunny shallows of the burn at her call and that in the stables behind the cottage where she lived there were sick beasties she found in the woods or up the rocky glen, or who came to her driven by instinct to seek human help and whom she tended back to health, why then it might well be worth the risk to deposit his frog with her. At any rate it appeared to be a legitimate excuse for the having of a tremendous adventure, whatever came of it.
He crossed the humpback bridge over the river and commenced the climb to the forest at the entrance to Glen Ardrath, past the grey bones of Castle Ardrath of which the circular inner keep and part of the stone curtain was all that had remained standing.
The home of the Red Witch was supposed to be situated a mile or more up the glen where the forest was heaviest and it took considerable courage for a small boy alone, even though panoplied as a Wolf Cub and filled with some of their woods lore, to enter the darkening area of lichened oak, spreading beech and sombre fir, and to push his way through the head-high bracken. He tamed his apprehensions by looking for and identifying the summer wildflowers in full blossom of July that cropped up beside the path he was following, purple thrift and scarlet pimpernel, yellow broom and the pink of the wild dog-rose that grew entangled with the white-flowering bramble, which in the late summer and fall would yield the sweetest blackberries. He recognised purple colum, red campion and the blue harebell, the true bluebell of Scotland, growing in profusion in a glade that seemed made by the traditional fairy ring of trees growing about a circle carpeted with flowers and warmed by shafts of sunlight that penetrated through the branches of the trees.
From there the hill climbed more steeply and he could hear, though not see, the wild rushing of the burn. He sat down there a moment to rest and took the frog out of the box and laid it on the moss where it palpitated but did not move. Watching it, Geordie felt his heart swell with pity for its plight and helplessness and, putting it back into the box, determined to see the matter through without further delay.
At last he came in sight of the cottage he sought, and with the guile of the Red Indian, properly instilled into every Wolf Cub, he paused, flattened out to reconnoitre.
The stone cottage was long and narrow and had chimneys standing up like ears at either end. The lids of green shutters were closed over the windows of its eyes and it seemed to be sleeping, poised on the edge of a clearing of the woods on what seemed to be a small plateau, a broadening of the side of the glen, and where the burn too widened out and moved more sluggishly. Behind it and off to one side was another long, low stone building that had once been a barn, no doubt, or cattle shelter. Geordie hugged his box close to his beating heart and continued to study the surroundings.
A Coven Oak raised its thick bole a dozen or so yards before the cottage and yet its spreading branches reached to the tiles of the roof, and the topmost ones overshadowed it. The great oak must have been more than two hundred years old and from the lowest of its branches there hung a silvered bell. From the tongue of the bell, a thin rope reached to the ground and trailed there. And now that he was himself quiet, Geordie was becoming aware of movements and sounds. From within the cottage there came a high, clear, sweet singing and a curiously muffled thumping. This, Geordie decided, was the witch, and he trembled now in his cover of fern and bracken and wished he had not come. The singing held him spellbound, but the thumping was sinister and ominous for he had never heard the working of a treadle on a hand loom.
Overhead, a red squirrel scolded him from the branch of a smooth grey-green beech; a raven and a hooded black crow were having a quarrel and suddenly began to flap and scream and beat one another with great strokes of their wings so that all of the birds in the area took fright and flew up, blue tits, robins, yellow wagtails, thrush and wrens, sparrow and finches. They circled the chimneys, chattering and complaining; two black and white magpies flashed in and out of the trees and from somewhere an owl called.
The voice from within rose higher in purest song though no melody that Geordie had ever heard, yet it had the strange effect of making him wish suddenly to put his hands to his eyes and weep. The beating wings ceased to flail and the cries and the flutterings of the birds quieted down. Geordie saw the white cotton tail of a rabbit down by the burn.
Thereupon, Geordie McNabb did something instinctively right and quite brave. He crept out from beneath his cover and advanced as far as the bell suspended from the Coven Tree and the rope hanging therefrom. At the foot of it he deposited his box with the frog in it and gave the rope a gentle tug until the bell, shivering and vibrating, rent the forest with its silvery echoes, stilling the voice and the thumping from within the house. As fast as his stumpy legs could carry him, Geordie fled across the clearing and dived once more into the safety of the cover of thick green fern.
The peal of the bell died away, but the quiet was immediately shattered by the hysterical barking of a dog. A Scotch terrier came racing around from the barn behind the house. A hundred birds rose into the air, making a soughing and whirring with their wings as they flew wildly about the chimneys. Two cats came walking formally and with purpose around the corner of the house, their tails straight up in the air, a black and a tiger-striped grey. They sat down quietly some distance away and waited. As Geordie watched, a young roe buck suddenly appeared out of the underbrush, head up and alert, the sun shining from its moist black nose and liquid eyes. It moved warily, tossing its fine head, its eyes fixed upon the house where the front door was slowly opening and with infinite caution.
Geordie McNabb’s heart beat furiously and he came close to giving way to panic and running for all he was worth. But his curiosity to see the Red Witch of Glen Ardrath, now that he had come this far and dared so much, and his need to find out what was to become of his frog, kept him there.
The door opened wide, but no Red Witch appeared, almost to Geordie McNabb’s disappointment, only a young woman, hardly more than a girl, it seemed to Geordie, a plain girl, a country girl, such as you could see anywhere on the farms surrounding Inveranoch, in simple skirt and smock with thick stockings and shoes, and a shawl around her shoulders.
She could not have been a witch, for she was neither beautiful nor hideous, and yet little Geordie found that he could not seem to take his eyes from her countenance. What was it that drew and held his gaze? He could not tell. Her nose was long and wise, and the space between it and her upper lip seemed wide and humorous so that somehow it made you want to smile looking at it. The mouth was both tender and rueful, and in the grey-green eyes there was a far-away look. Her hair, which hung loose to her shoulders in the fashion of country girls, was not bound and was the cherry colour of a glowing blacksmith’s bar before he begins to cool it.
She looked out of the door, brushing away a lock of the dark red hair from her forehead and the gesture too was of one who is also clearing away cobwebs from the mind. Geordie lay there on his belly, hidden by the ferns, loving her suddenly with all his heart and he did not know why nor did he think of any spell cast upon him but only that she was there and he loved her.
The girl looked about her for a moment and then to Geordie’s surprise gave a high, clear call on two notes. For a moment, Geordie thought that the silver bell was still ringing, so clear and piercing was the call, but the sides of the metal had long ceased vibrating and it was only her throat that produced the marvellous sound.
It acted upon the buck, who came stepping nimbly out of the woods and walked slowly across half the clearing as she stood contemplating the animal out of her far-away eyes, with a rueful smile at her lips. The deer stopped and lowered its head and stood there gazing up at her mischievously and playfully so that she burst into laughter and cried – “Was it you then, at the bell again? For that you’ll be waiting for your supper –”
But the buck, as though suddenly alarmed, or sensing