“The Laird’s Luck” was written by A.T. Quiller-Couch and first appeared in The Laird’s Luck and Other Fireside Tales (1901). Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) was a British poet, novelist, and critic who wrote under the pseudonym of “Q.” He was known in his lifetime not just for his writing but also as an educator and lecturer. Quiller-Couch was a talented writer, and “The Laird’s Luck” is accurately seen as one of his best stories.

In the official history of the Moray Highlanders is a memorandum from Lieutenant Colonel Sir James Ross in which he relates a curious story which he witnessed. In 1814 he was invalided home to Inverness with a shattered ankle received at Salamanca. He and his brother were rescued from a boating accident by a native, Mr. Gillespie, but the first landing they came to was that of David Mackenzie, and Gillespie gave Ross and his brother to Mackenzie in a rude manner. Mackenzie, a young laird obviously fallen on hard times, brought the pair to his home, an outlandish and badly designed manor on the lip of a ravine. The Rosses are shown to their rooms by Elspeth, Mackenzie’s maid, and fear for the worst, given the impoverished state of the manor, but they discover their rooms to be clean and well stocked, with recently lit candles, hot water, and clean towels waiting for them. This surprises them, since they can’t figure out how all that was done so quickly. At dinner Ross notices that “poverty and decent appearance kept up a brave fight throughout,”¹ since the tablecloth and napkins are aged and ragged but exquisitely darned, the silverware “scanty and worn with high polishing.”² The groaning table itself is surprisingly well stocked, given the laird’s poverty. The laird, on being complimented on the quality of his venison, says that he has no deer forest, and Elspeth is his only housekeeper. The laird’s only guest, the local priest, Reverend Saul, leaves abruptly, and Mackenzie complains that he has been at the manor for only a year, and wants to do well by the locals, but they all distrust him and treat him coolly. Ross responds by suggesting that Mackenzie join the Moray Regiment, something Mackenzie is only too happy to agree to. But the following morning the Rosses’ clothes are cleaned and folded, despite the doors to their rooms having been locked, and when Ross compliments Mackenzie on having “a remarkably clever valet” Mackenzie takes the compliment amiss. Ross politely covers himself and the moment passes.

The following January Mackenzie is appointed to an ensigncy in the Moray Highlanders, and he joins them in Inverness. Mackenzie is popular with the men and positively impresses Ross as potential officer material. The other officers, who are also lairds, are not such bright prospects, especially as they are given to card playing, something Ross frowns upon. One of them, Urquhart, is friends after a fashion with Mackenzie. After Napoleon escapes from Elba the Highlanders go off to war in France. In Brussels, two nights before Waterloo, Urquhart and Mackenzie get into a fight while playing cards. Ross breaks up the fight and demands to know the cause of it. Urquhart accuses Mackenzie of cheating, something serious which enrages Mackenzie. Ross asks his brother about how this could have happened, and his brother admits that there are stories against Mackenzie and that men do not like to play him. Ross grills Urquhart, who will only say that Mackenzie was cheating but did not know that he was cheating. Urquhart will go into no further detail, since he says Ross won’t believe him. Ross sends Urquhart back, intending to question Mackenzie, but when Urquhart sees Mackenzie and Mackenzie challenges Urquhart to a duel, Urquhart refuses to fight him. Another officer tells Ross about a stolen coin which was in Mackenzie’s pot, and about how an officer’s watch had been stolen one night and showed up in Mackenzie’s room. (Mackenzie, finding it in the morning, returned it to the officer). Ross decides to question Mackenzie in his room, but on walking up the stairs he hears a voice in Mackenzie’s room:

The voice was so unlike his, or any grown man’s, that it arrested me on the lowermost stair against my will. It resembled rather the sobbing of an infant mingled with short strangled cries of contrition and despair.

“What shall I do? What shall I do? I didn’t mean it–I meant to do good! What shall I do?”³

Mackenzie is passive and uncooperative when Ross questions him about the incident, but swears that he stole nothing and did not cheat. Ross brings Mackenzie and Urquhart back together and is haranguing them both when they hear an alarm bugle, summoning the three to form up the regiment. Ross cuts the interview short, and Urquhart begs Ross not to let Mackenzie go to war, but Ross tells him to shut up (“As for you, the most charitable construction I can put on your behavior is to believe you mad”⁴) and goes to war. The Highlanders fight Ney’s forces, and when Urquhart, the bearer of the Kings colours, is overthrown, Mackenzie dies preventing the standard from falling into French hands. That night Urquhart approaches Ross again and tells him that he, Urquhart, saw Mackenzie’s wraith during the poker game, and thus knew that Mackenzie would be killed in the coming battle: “You are a Highlander, sir: you may be skeptical about the second sight; but at least you must have heard many claim it.”⁵ That’s why Urquhart begged Ross not to send Mackenzie off to war. Urquhart is killed at Waterloo before he can tell Ross everything. After the war ends Ross discovers that the Reverend Saul had visited Inverness several times, trying to find out what happened and when the Highlanders would be returning. Ross meets with Saul and Elspeth, and Elspeth explains that she bore a son to Mackenzie’s father; it was born out of wedlock and died without being baptized, and so became a brownie, a “familiar spirit” which served Mackenzie “most faithfully but at times erratically, having no conscience nor any Christian principle to direct him.”⁶ So Elspeth’s son took to the laird, “Mackenzie to Mackenzie,” and “loved his own father’s son” and wanted to serve him the best way possible. This included cleaning around the house and making hot water and the like, but also included theft: food from neighboring estates, which is why the groaning board was so overloaded when Ross first met Mackenzie; apples from the Reverend Saul’s tree, which is why Saul left so abruptly–he saw his own apples on Mackenzie’s table; and coins and watches from officers in the Moray Regiment. But the boy meant no wrong, and when Mackenzie was in trouble the boy came home to his mother.

“The Laird’s Luck” is a story of fidelity and God’s grace. It is not moving in the way that “The Roll Call of the Reef” is, but is otherwise excellent. Q tells the story with his usual high style, combining clarity, historical detail, and well-turned phrases, and the story is a pleasure to read. Quiller-Couch is not usually considered to be a Christian fantasist, more usually being thought of as a folklorist and teller of folklore-inflected tales, but “The Laird’s Luck” is well within the genre of Christian fantasy. The second half of the nineteenth century were decades in which the Christian fantasy flourished (see: “The Botathen Ghost,” “Master Sacristan Eberhart”). “A tradition of explicit Literary Satanism...was eventually founded by Anatole France, extrapolating from precedents set by Gustave Flaubert. Christian writers, not unnaturally, regarded this trend with alarm and horror, and many took it upon themselves to write compensatory fantasies, often involving Angels as Miracle-working agents of divine intervention.”⁷ Many of these writers told Christian fantasies in short stories, although the best were at novel-length.

Print: Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Horror on the Stair and Other Weird Stories. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2000.

¹ A.T. Quiller-Couch, “The Laird’s Luck,” in The Laird’s Luck, and Other Fireside Tales (London: Cassell, 1901), 13.

² Quiller-Couch, “The Laird’s Luck,” 13.

³ Quiller-Couch, “The Laird’s Luck,” 34.

⁴ Quiller-Couch, “The Laird’s Luck,” 45.

⁵ Quiller-Couch, “The Laird’s Luck,” 52.

⁶ Quiller-Couch, “The Laird’s Luck,” 56.

⁷ Brian Stableford, “Christian Fantasy,” in John Clute and John Grant, ed,, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, accessed Oct. 27, 2018, http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=christian_fantasy