Of course Clan MacNicoll was brought to book for this frolic on Inneraora fair-day, banned by Kirk, and soundly beaten by the Doomster in name of law. To read some books I’ve read, one would think our Gaels in the time I speak of, and even now, were pagan and savage. We are not, I admit it, fashioned on the prim style of London dandies and Italian fops; we are—the poorest of us—coarse a little at the hide, too quick, perhaps, to slash out with knife or hatchet, and over-ready to carry the most innocent argument the dire length of a thrust with the sword. That’s the blood; it’s the common understanding among ourselves. But we were never such thieves and marauders, caterans bloody and unashamed, as the Galloway kerns and the Northmen, and in all my time we had plenty to do to fend our straths against reivers and cattle-drovers from the bad clans round about us. We lift no cattle in all Campbell country. When I was a lad some of the old-fashioned tenants in Glenaora once or twice went over to Glen Nant and Rannoch and borrowed a few beasts; but the Earl (as he was then) gave them warning for it that any vassal of his found guilty of such practice again should hang at the town-head as readily as he would hang a Cowal man for theftuously awaytaking a board of kipper salmon. My father (peace with him!) never could see the logic of it “It’s no theft,” he would urge, “but war on the parish scale: it needs coolness of the head, some valour, and great genius to take fifty or maybe a hundred head of bestial hot-hoof over hill and moor. I would never blame a man for lifting a mart of black cattle any more than for killing a deer: are not both the natural animals of these mountains, prey lawful to the first lad who can tether or paunch them?”
“Not in the fold, father!” I mind of remonstrating once.
“In the fold too,” he said. “Who respects Bredal-bane’s fenced deer? Not the most Christian elders in Glenurchy: they say grace over venison that crossed a high dyke in the dead of night tail first, or game birds that tumbled out of their dream on the bough into the reek of a brimstone fire. A man might as well claim the fish of the sea and the switch of the wood, and refuse the rest of the world a herring or a block of wood, as put black cattle in a fank and complain because he had to keep watch on them!”
It was odd law, but I must admit my father made the practice run with the precept, for more than once he refused to take back cattle lifted by the Macgregors from us, because they had got over his march-stone.
But so far from permitting this latitude in the parish of Inneraora, Kirk and State frowned it down, and sins far less heinous. The session was bitterly keen on Sabbath-breakers, and to start on a Saturday night a kiln-drying of oats that would claim a peat or two on Sabbath, was accounted immorality of the most gross kind.
Much of this strict form, it is to be owned, was imported by the Lowland burghers, and set up by the Lowland session of the English kirk, of which his lordship was an elder, and the Highlanders took to it badly for many a day. They were aye, for a time, driving their cattle through the town on the Lord’s day or stravaiging about the roads and woods, or drinking and listening to pipers piping in the change-houses at time of sermon, fond, as all our people are by nature, of the hearty open air, and the smell of woods, and lusty sounds like the swing of the seas and pipers playing old tunes. Out would come elders and deacons to scour the streets and change-houses for them, driving them, as if with scourges, into worship. Gaelic sermon (or Irish sermon, as the Scots called it) was but every second Sabbath, and on the blank days the landward Highlanders found in town bound to go to English sermon whether they knew the language or not, a form which it would be difficult nowadays to defend. And it was, in a way, laughable to see the big Gaels driven to chapel like boys by the smug light burghers they could have crushed with a hand. But time told; there was sown in the landward mind by the blessing of God (and some fear of the Marquis, no doubt) a respect for Christian ordinance, and by the time I write of there were no more devout churchgoers and respecters of the law ecclesiastic than the umquhile pagan small-clans of Loch Firme and the Glens.
It is true that Nicol Beg threatened the church-officer with his dirk when he came to cite him before the session a few days after the splore in Inneraora, but he stood his trial like a good Christian all the same, he and half a score of his clan, as many as the church court could get the names of. I was a witness against them, much against my will, with John Splendid, the Provost, and other townsfolk.
Some other defaulters were dealt with before the Mac-Nicolls, a few throughither women and lads from the back-lanes of the burghs, on the old tale, a shoreside man for houghing a quey, and a girl Mac Vicar, who had been for a season on a visit to some Catholic relatives in the Isles, and was charged with malignancy and profanity.
Poor lass! I was wae for her. She stood bravely beside her father, whose face was as begrutten as hers was serene, and those who put her through her catechism found to my mind but a good heart and tolerance where they sought treachery and rank heresy. They convicted her notwithstanding.
“You have stood your trials badly, Jean MacVicar,” said Master Gordon. “A backslider and malignant proven! You may fancy your open profession of piety, your honesty and charity, make dykes to the narrow way. A fond delusion, woman! There are, sorrow on it! many lax people of your kind in Scotland this day, hangers-on at the petticoat tails of the whore of Babylon, sitting like you, as honest worshippers at the tables of the Lord, eating Christian elements that but for His mercy choked them at the thrapple. You are a wicked woman!”
“She’s a good daughter,” broke in the father through his tears; but his Gaelic never stopped the minister.
“An ignorant besom.”
“She’s leech-wife to half Kenmore,” protested the old man.
“And this court censures you, ordains you to make public confession at both English and Gaelic kirks before the congregations, thereafter to be excommunicate and banished furth and from this parish of Inneraora and Glenaora.”
The girl never winced.
Her father cried again. “She can’t leave me,” said he, and he looked to the Marquis, who all the time sat on the hard deal forms, like a plain man. “Your lordship kens she is motherless and my only kin; that’s she true and honest.”
The Marquis said yea nor nay, but had a minute’s talk with the clergyman, as I thought at the time, to make him modify his ruling. But Master Gordon enforced the finding of the session.
“Go she must,” said he; “we cannot have our young people poisoned at the mind.”
“Then she’ll bide with me,” said the father, angrily.
“You dare not, as a Christian professor, keep an excommunicate in your house,” said Gordon; “but taking to consideration that excommunication precludes not any company of natural relations, we ordain you never to keep her in your house in this parish any more; but if you have a mind to do so with her, to follow her wherever she goes.”
And that sorry small family went out at the door, in tears.
Some curious trials followed, and the making of quaint bylaws; for now that his lordship, ever a restraining influence on his clans, was bound for new wars elsewhere, a firmer hand was wanted on the people he left behind, and Master Gordon pressed for stricter canons. Notification was made discharging the people of the burgh from holding lyke-wakes in the smaller houses, from unnecessary travel on the Sabbath, from public flyting and abusing, and from harbouring ne’er-do-weels from other parishes; and seeing it had become a practice of the women attending kirk to keep their plaids upon their heads and faces in time of sermon as occasion of sleeping, as also that they who slept could not be distinguished from those who slept not, that they might be wakened, it was ordained that such be not allowed hereafter, under pain of taking the plaids from them.
With these enactments too came evidence of the Kirk’s paternity. It settled the salary (200 pounds Scots) of a new master for the grammar-school, agreed to pay the fees of divers poor scholars, instructed the administering of the funds in the poor’s-box, fixed a levy on the town for the following week to help the poorer wives who would be left by their fencible husbands, and paid ten marks to an elderly widow woman who desired, like a good Gael, to have her burial clothes ready, but had not the wherewithal for linen.
“We are,” said Master Gordon, sharpening a pen in a pause ere the MacNicolls came forward, “the fathers and guardians of this parish people high and low. Too long has Loch Finne side been ruled childishly. I have no complaint about its civil rule—his lordship here might well be trusted to that; but its religion was a thing of rags. They tell me old Campbell in the Gaelic end of the church (peace with him!) used to come to the pulpit with a broadsword belted below his Geneva gown. Savagery, savagery, rank and stinking! I’ll say it to his face in another world, and a poor evangel and ensample truly for the quarrelsome landward folk of this parish, that even now, in the more unctuous times of God’s grace, doff steel weapons so reluctantly. I found a man with a dirk at his hip sitting before the Lord’s table last Lammas!”
“Please God,” said the Marquis, “the world shall come to its sight some day. My people are of an unruly race, I ken, good at the heart, hospitable, valorous, even with some Latin chivalry; but, my sorrow! they are sorely unamenable to policies of order and peace.”
“Deil the hair vexed am I,” said John Splendid in my ear; “I have a wonderful love for nature that’s raw and human, and this session-made morality is but a gloss. They’ll be taking the tartan off us next maybe! Some day the old dog at the heart of the Highlands will bark for all his sleek coat Man! I hate the very look of those Lowland cattle sitting here making kirk laws for their emperors, and their bad-bred Scots speech jars on my ear like an ill-tuned bagpipe.”
Master Gordon possibly guessed what was the topic of Splendid’s confidence,—in truth, few but knew my hero’s mind on these matters; and I have little doubt it was for John’s edification he went on to sermonise, still at the shaping of his pen.
“Your lordship will have the civil chastisement of these MacNicolls after this session is bye with them. We can but deal with their spiritual error. Nicol Beg and his relatives are on our kirk rolls as members or adherents, and all we can do is to fence the communion-table against them for a period, and bring them to the stool of repentance. Some here may think a night of squabbling and broken heads in a Highland burgh too trifling an affair for the interference of the kirk or the court of law: I am under no such delusion. There is a valour better than the valour of the beast unreasoning. Your lordship has seen it at its proper place in your younger wars; young Elrigmore, I am sure, has seen it on the Continent, where men live quiet burgh lives while left alone, and yet comport themselves chivalrously and gallantly on the stricken fields when their country or a cause calls for them so to do. In the heart of man is hell smouldering, always ready to leap out in flames of sharpened steel; it’s a poor philosophy that puffs folly in at the ear to stir the ember, saying, ‘Hiss, catch him, dog!’ I’m for keeping hell (even in a wild High-landman’s heart) for its own business of punishing the wicked.”
“Amen to yon!” cried MacCailein, beating his hand on a book-board, and Master Gordon took a snuff like a man whose doctrine is laid out plain for the world and who dare dispute it. In came the beadle with the MacNicolls, very much cowed, different men truly from the brave gentlemen who cried blood for blood on Provost Brown’s stair.
They had little to deny, and our evidence was but a word ere the session passed sentence of suspension from the kirk tables, as Gordon had said, and a sheriffs officer came to hale them to the Tolbooth for their trial on behalf of the civil law.
With their appearance there my tale has nothing to do; the Doomster, as I have said, had the handling of them with birch. What I have described of this kirk-session’s cognisance of those rough fellows’ ill behaviour is designed ingeniously to convey a notion of its strict ceremony and its wide dominion,—to show that even in the heart of Arraghael we were not beasts in that year when the red flash of the sword came on us and the persecution of the torch. The MacNicoll’s Night in the Hie Street of MacCailein Mot’s town was an adventure uncommon enough to be spoken of for years after, and otherwise (except for the little feuds between the Glens-men and the burghers without tartan), our country-side was as safe as the heart of France—safer even. You might leave your purse on the open road anywhere within the Crooked Dyke with uncounted gold in it and be no penny the poorer at the week’s end; there was never lock or bar on any door in any of the two glens—locks, indeed, were a contrivance the Lowlanders brought for the first time to the town; and the gardens lay open to all who had appetite for kail or berry. There was no man who sat down to dinner (aye in the landward part I speak of; it differed in the town) without first going to the door to look along the high road to see if wayfarers were there to share the meal with him and his family. “There he goes,” was the saying about any one who passed the door at any time without coming in to take a spoon—“there he goes; I’ll warrant he’s a miser at home to be so much of a churl abroad” The very gipsy claimed the cleanest bed in a Glenman’s house whenever he came that way, and his gossip paid handsomely for his shelter.
It was a fine fat land this of ours, mile upon mile thick with herds, rolling in the grassy season like the seas, growing such lush crops as the remoter Highlands never dreamt of. Not a foot of good soil but had its ploughing, or at least gave food to some useful animal, and yet so rocky the hills between us and lower Lochow, so tremendous steep and inaccessible the peaks and corries north of Ben Bhuidhe, that they were relegated to the chase. There had the stag his lodging and the huntsman a home almost perpetual. It was cosy, indeed, to see at evening the peat-smoke from well-governed and comfortable hearths lingering on the quiet air, to go where you would and find bairns toddling on the braes or singing women bent to the peat-creel and the reaping-hook.
In that autumn I think nature gave us her biggest cup brimmingly, and my father, as he watched his servants binding corn head high, said he had never seen the like before. In the hazel-woods the nuts bent the branches, so thick were they, so succulent; the hip and the haw, the blaeberry and the rowan, swelled grossly in a constant sun; the orchards of the richer folks were in a revelry of fruit Somehow the winter grudged, as it were, to come. For ordinary, October sees the trees that beard Dun-chuach and hang for miles on the side of Creag Dubh searing and falling below the frost; this season the cold stayed aloof long, and friendly winds roved from the west and south. The forests gleamed in a golden fire that only cooled to darkness when the firs, my proud tall friends, held up their tasselled heads in unquenching green. Birds swarmed in the heather, and the sides of the bare hills moved constantly with deer. Never a stream in all real Argile but boiled with fish; you came down to Eas-a-chleidh on the Aora with a creel and dipped it into the linn to bring out salmon rolling with fat.
All this I dwell on for a sensible purpose, though it may seem to be but an old fellow’s boasting and a childish vanity about my own calf-country. ‘Tis the picture I would paint—a land laughing and content, well governed by Gillesbeg, though Gruamach he might be by name and by nature. Fourpence a-day was a labourer’s wage, but what need had one of even fourpence, with his hut free and the food piling richly at his very door?
On the 27th of July in this same year 1644 we saw his lordship and his clan march from Inneraora to the dreary north. By all accounts (brought in to the Marquis by foot-runners from the frontier of Lorn), the Irishry of Colkitto numbered no more than 1200, badly armed with old matchlocks and hampered by two or three dozen camp-women bearing the bairns of this dirty regiment at their breasts. Add to this as many Highlanders under Montrose and his cousin Para Dubh of Inchbrackie, and there was but a force of 3500 men for the good government of Argile to face. But what were they? If the Irish were poorly set up in weapons the Gaels were worse. On the spring before, Gillesbeg had harried Athole, and was cunning enough to leave its armouries as bare as the fields he burned, so now its clans had but home-made claymores, bows, and arrows, Lochaber tuaghs and cudgels, with no heavy pieces. The cavalry of this unholy gang was but three garrons, string and bone. Worse than their ill-arming, as any soldier of experience will allow, were the jealousies between the two bodies of the scratched-up army. Did ever one see a Gael that nestled to an Irishman? Here’s one who will swear it impossible, though it is said the blood is the same in both races, and we nowadays read the same Gaelic Bible. Colkitto MacDonald was Gael by birth and young breeding, but Erinach by career, and repugnant to the most malignant of the west clans before they got to learn, as they did later, his quality as a leader. He bore down on Athole, he and his towsy rabble, hoping to get the clans there to join him greedily for the sake of the old feud against MacCailein Mor, but the Stewarts would have nothing to say to him, and blows were not far off when Montrose and his cousin Black Pate came on the scene with his king’s licence.
To meet this array now playing havoc on the edge of Campbell country, rumour said two armies were moving from the north and east: if Argile knew of them he kept his own counsel on the point, but he gave colour to the tale by moving from Inneraora with no more than 2000 foot and a troop of horse. These regimentals had mustered three days previously, camping on the usual camping-ground at the Maltland, where I spent the last day and night with them. They were, for the main part, the Campbells of the shire: of them alone the chief could muster 5000 half-merkland men at a first levy, all capable swordsmen, well drilled and disciplined soldadoes, who had, in addition to the usual schooling in arms of every Gael, been taught many of the niceties of new-fashioned war, countermarch, wheeling, and pike-drill. To hear the orders, “Pouldron to pouldron; keep your files; and middlemen come forth!” was like an echo from my old days in Germanie. These manoeuvres they were instructed in by hired veterans of the Munro and Mackay battalions who fought with Adolphus. Four or five companies of Lowland soldiers from Dunbarton and Stirling eked out the strength; much was expected from the latter, for they were, unlike our clansmen, never off the parade-ground, and were in receipt of pay for their militant service; but as events proved, they were MacCailein’s poor reed.
I spent, as I have said, a day and a night in the camp between Aora river and the deep wood of Tarradubh. The plain hummed with our little army, where now are but the nettle and the ivied tower, and the yellow bee booming through the solitude; morning and night the shrill of the piob-mhor rang cheerily to the ear of Dun-chuach; the sharp call of the chieftains and sergeants, the tramp of the brogued feet in their simple evolutions, the clatter of arms, the contention and the laughing, the song, the reprimand, the challenge, the jest,—all these were pleasant to me.
One morning I got up from a bed of gall or bog-myrtle I shared with John Splendid after a late game of chess, and fared out on a little eminence looking over the scene. Not a soldier stirred in his plaid; the army was drugged by the heavy fir-winds from the forest behind. The light of the morning flowed up wider and whiter from the Cowal hills, the birds woke to a rain of twittering prayer among the bushes ere ever a man stirred more than from side to side to change his dream. It was the most melancholy hour I ever experienced, and I have seen fields in the wan morning before many a throng and bloody day. I felt “fey,” as we say at home—a premonition that here was no conquering force, a sorrow for the glens raped of their manhood, and hearths to be desolate. By-and-by the camp moved into life, Dun-barton’s drums beat the reveille, the pipers arose, doffed their bonnets to the sun, and played a rouse; my gloom passed like a mist from the mountains.
They went north by the Aora passes into the country of Bredalbane, and my story need not follow them beyond.
Inneraora burghers went back to their commercial affairs, and I went to Glen Shira to spend calm days on the river and the hill. My father seemed to age perceptibly, reflecting on his companion gone, and he clung to me like the crotal to the stone. Then it was (I think) that some of the sobriety of life first came to me, a more often cogitation and balancing of affairs. I began to see some of the tanglement of nature, and appreciate the solemn mystery of our travel across this vexed and care-warped world. Before, I was full of the wine of youth, giving doubt of nothing a lodgment in my mind, acting ever on the impulse, sucking the lemon, seeds and all, and finding it unco sappy and piquant to the palate. To be face to face day after day with this old man’s grief, burdened with his most apparent double love, conscious that I was his singular bond to the world he would otherwise be keen to be leaving, set me to chasten my dalliance with fate. Still and on, our affection and its working on my prentice mind is nothing to dwell on publicly. I’ve seen bearded men kiss each other in the France, a most scandalous exhibition surely, one at any rate that I never gazed on without some natural Highland shame, and I would as soon kiss my father at high noon on the open street as dwell with paper and ink upon my feeling to him.
We settled down to a few quiet weeks after the troops had gone. Rumours came of skirmishes at Tippermuir and elsewhere. I am aware that the fabulous Wishart makes out that our lads were defeated by Montrose at every turning, claiming even Dundee, Crief, Strathbogie, Methven Wood, Philiphaugh, Inverness, and Dunbeath. Let any one coldly calculate the old rogue’s narrative, and it will honestly appear that the winner was more often Argile, though his lordship never followed up his advantage with slaughter and massacre as did his foes at Aberdeen. All these doings we heard of but vaguely, for few came back except an odd lad wounded and cut off in the wilds of Athole from the main body.
Constant sentinels watched the land from the fort of Dunchuach, that dominates every pass into our country, and outer guards took day and night about on the remoter alleys of Aora and Shira Glens. South, east, and west, we had friendly frontiers; only to the north were menace and danger, and from the north came our scaith—the savage north and jealous.
These considerations seemed, on the surface, little to affect Inneraora and its adjacent parts. We slept soundly at night, knowing the warders were alert; the women with absent husbands tempered their anxiety with the philosophy that comes to a race ever bound to defend its own doors.
The common folks had ceilidhs at night—gossip parties in each other’s houses, and in our own hall the herds and shepherds often convocat to change stories, the tales of the Fingalians, Ossian and the Firme. The burgh was a great place for suppers too, and never ceilidh nor supper went I to but the daughter of Provost Brown was there before me. She took a dislike to me, I guessed at last, perhaps thinking I appeared too often; and I was never fully convinced of this till I met her once with some companions walking in the garden of the castle, that always stood open for the world.
I was passing up the Dame’s Pad, as it was called, a little turfed road, overhung by walnut trees brought by the old Earl from England. I had on a Lowland costume with a velvet coat and buckled shoes, and one or two vanities a young fellow would naturally be set up about, and the consciousness of my trim clothing put me in a very complacent mood as I stopped and spoke with the damsels.
They were pretty girls all, and I remember particularly that Betty had a spray of bog-myrtle and heather fastened at a brooch at her neck.
She was the only one who received me coldly, seemed indeed impatient to be off, leaving the conversation to her friends while she toyed with a few late flowers on the bushes beside her.
“You should never put heather and gall together,” I said to her, rallyingly.
“Indeed!” she said, flushing. “Here’s one who wears what she chooses, regardless of custom or freit.”
“But you know,” I said, “the badge of the Campbell goes badly with that of so bitter a foe as the MacDonald. You might as well add the oak-stalk of Montrose, and make the emblem tell the story of those troubles.”
It was meant in good-humour, but for some reason it seemed to sting her to the quick. I could see it in the flash of her eyes and the renewed flush at her temples.
There was a little mischievous girl in the company, who giggled and said, “Betty’s in a bad key to-day; her sweetheart has vexed her surely.”
It was a trivial remark, but I went off with it in my mind.
A strange interest in the moods of this old school-friend had begun to stir me. Meeting her on my daily walks to town by the back way through the new avenue, I found her seemingly anxious to avoid me, and difficult to warm to any interest but in the most remote and abstract affairs. Herself she would never speak of, her plans, cares, ambitions, preferences, or aversions; she seemed dour set on aloofness. And though she appeared to listen to my modestly phrased exploits with attention and respect, and some trepidation at the dangerous portions, she had notably more interest in my talk of others. Ours was the only big house in the glen she never came calling to, though her father was an attentive visitor and supped his curds-and-cream of a Saturday with friendly gusto, apologising for her finding something to amuse and detain her at Roderick’s over the way, or the widow’s at Gearran Bridge.
I would go out on these occasions and walk in the open air with a heart uneasy.
And now it was I came to conclude, after all, that much as a man may learn of many women studied indifferently, there is something magical about his personal regard for one, that sets up a barrier of mystery between them. So long as I in former years went on the gay assumption that every girl’s character was on the surface, and I made no effort to probe deeper, I was the confidant, the friend, of many a fine woman. They all smiled at my douce sobriety, but in the end they preferred it to the gaudy recklessness of more handsome men.
But here was the conclusion of my complacent belief in my knowledge of the sex. The oftener I met her the worse my friendship progressed. She became a problem behind a pretty mask, and I would sit down, as it were, dumb before it and guess at the real woman within. Her step on the road as we would come to an unexpected meeting, her handling of a flower I might give her in a courtesy, her most indifferent word as we met or parted, became a precious clue I must ponder on for hours. And the more I weighed these things, the more confused thereafter I became in her presence. “If I were in love with the girl,” I had to say to myself at last, “I could not be more engrossed on her mind.”
The hill itself, with days of eager hunting after the red-deer, brought not enough distraction, and to stand by the mountain tarns and fish the dark trout was to hold a lonely carnival with discontent.
It happened sometimes that on the street of Inneraora I would meet Betty convoying her cousin young Mac-Lachlan to his wherry (he now took care to leave for home betimes), or with his sister going about the shops. It would be but a bow in the bye-going, she passing on with equanimity and I with a maddening sense of awkwardness, that was not much bettered by the tattle of the plainstanes, where merchant lads and others made audible comment on the cousinly ardour of young Lachie.
On Sundays, perhaps worst of all, I found my mind’s torment. Our kirk to-day is a building of substantiality and even grace; then it was a somewhat squalid place of worship, in whose rafters the pigeon trespassed and the swallow built her home. We sat in torturous high-backed benches so narrow that our knees rasped the boards before us, and sleep in Master Gordon’s most dreary discourse was impossible. Each good family in the neighbourhood had its own pew, and Elrigmore’s, as it is to this day, lay well in the rear among the shadows of the loft, while the Provost’s was a little to the left and at right angles, so that its occupants and ours were in a manner face to face.
Gordon would be into many deeps of doctrine no doubt while I was in the deeper depths of speculation upon my lady’s mind. I think I found no great edification from the worship of those days—shame to tell it!—for the psalms we chanted had inevitably some relevance to an earthly affection, and my eyes were for ever roaming from the book or from the preacher’s sombre face.
They might rove far and long, but the end of each journey round that dull interior was ever in the Provost’s pew, and, as if by some hint of the spirit, though Betty might be gazing steadfastly where she ought, I knew that she knew I was looking on her. It needed but my glance to bring a flush to her averted face. Was it the flush of annoyance or of the conscious heart? I asked myself, and remembering her coldness elsewhere, I was fain to think my interest was considered an impertinence. And there I would be in a cold perspiration of sorry apprehension.
The Highlanders of Lochaber, as the old saying goes, “pay their daughters’ tochers by the light of the Michaelmas moon.” Then it was that they were wont to come over our seven hills and seven waters to help themselves to our cattle when the same were at their fattest and best It would be a skurry of bare knees down pass and brae, a ring of the robbers round the herd sheltering on the bieldy side of the hill or in the hollows among the ripe grass, a brisk change of shot and blow if alarm rose, and then hie! over the moor by Macfarlane’s lantern.
This Michaelmas my father put up a buaile-mhart, a square fold of wattle and whinstone, into which the herdsmen drove the lowing beasts at the mouth of every evening, and took turn about in watching them throughout the clear season. It was perhaps hardly needed, for indeed the men of Lochaber and Glenfalloch and the other dishonest regions around us were too busy dipping their hands in the dirty work of Montrose and his Irish major-general to have any time for their usual autumn’s recreation. But a buaile-mhart when shifted from time to time in a field is a profitable device in agriculture, and custom had made the existence of it almost a necessity to the sound slumber of our glens. There was a pleasant habit, too, of neighbours gathering at night about a fire within one of the spaces of the fold and telling tales and singing songs. Our whole West Country is full of the most wonderful stories one might seek in vain for among the world of books and scholars—of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, and sea-maiden. The most unlikely looking peasant that ever put his foot to a caschrom, the most uncouth hunter that ever paunched a deer, would tell of such histories in the most scrupulous language and with cunning regard for figure of speech. I know that nowadays, among people of esteemed cultivation in the low country and elsewhere, such a diversion might be thought a waste of time, such narratives a sign of superstition. Of that I am not so certain. The practice, if it did no more, gave wings to our most sombre hours, and put a point on the imagination. As for the superstition of the tales of ceilidh and buaile-mhart I have little to say. Perhaps the dullest among us scarce credited the giant and dwarf; but the Little Folks are yet on our topmost hills.
A doctor laughed at me once for an experience of my own at the Piper’s Knowe, on which any man, with a couchant ear close to the grass, may hear fairy tunes piped in the under-world.
“A trick of the senses,” said he.
“But I can bring you scores who have heard it!” said I.
“So they said of every miracle since time began,” said he; “it but proves the widespread folly and credulity of human nature.”
I protested I could bring him to the very spot or whistle him the very tunes; but he was busy, and wondered so sedate a man as myself could cherish so strange a delusion.
Our fold on Elrigmore was in the centre of a flat meadowland that lies above Dhu Loch, where the river winds among rush and willow-tree, a constant whisperer of love and the distant hills and the salt inevitable sea. There we would be lying under moon and star, and beside us the cattle deeply breathing all night long. To the simple tale of old, to the humble song, these circumstances gave a weight and dignity they may have wanted elsewhere. Never a teller of tale, or a singer of song so artless in that hour and mood of nature, but he hung us breathless on his every accent: we were lone inhabitants of a little space in a magic glen, and the great world outside the flicker of our fire hummed untenanted and empty through the jealous night.
It happened on a night of nights—as the saying goes—that thus we were gathered in the rushy flat of Elrigmore and our hearts easy as to reivers—for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?—when a hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the last days of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckled with sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling in the east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air.
We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had set proverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was the young morning when through the long grass to the fold came a band of strangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission might be, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch.
The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of them came forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they could look in and see the watchers gathered round the fire.
“Co tha’n sud’s an uchd air a bhuaile?” (“Who is there leaning on the fold?”) asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands.
He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastly eerie in their silence on the wall.
“Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m’inthaidh aig an fhear as gile broilleach agaibh” (“My arrow’s for the whitest breast, if ye make no answer “), said my man, and there was no answer.
The string twanged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the white breast fell—shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clan they name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when we rushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field.
They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, but namely now through the west for their depredations when the absence of their men in battles threw them upon their own resource.
And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grieved at slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay passing, with the blood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran each other in their hurry from her foul lips.
“Dogs! dogs!—heaven’s worst ill on ye, dogs!” she cried, a waeful spectacle, and she spat on us as we carried her beside the fire to try and staunch her wound. She had a fierce knife at her waist and would have used it had she the chance, but we removed it from her reach, and she poured a fresher, fuller stream of malediction.
Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it was then—with the sweat on her brow—she gave the hint I speak of, the hint of the war’s end and the end of MacCailein Mor.
“Wry-mouths, wry-mouths!” said she; “I see the heather above the myrtle on Lhinne-side, and MacCailein’s head on a post.”
That was all.
It is a story you will find in no books, and yet a story that has been told sometime or other by every fireside of the shire—not before the prophecy was fulfilled but after, when we were loosed from our bonded word. For there and then we took oath on steel to tell no one of the woman’s saying till the fulness of time should justify or disgrace the same.
Though I took oath on this melancholy business like the rest, there was one occasion, but a day or two after, that I almost broke my pledged word, and that to the lady who disturbed my Sunday worship and gave me so much reflection on the hunting-road. Her father, as I have said, came up often on a Saturday and supped his curds-and-cream and grew cheery over a Dutch bottle with my father, and one day, as luck had it, Betty honoured our poor doorstep. She came so far, perhaps, because our men and women were at work on the field I mention, whose second crop of grass they were airing for the winter byres—a custom brought to the glen from foreign parts, and with much to recommend it.
I had such a trepidation at her presence that I had almost fled on some poor excuse to the hill; but the Provost, who perhaps had made sundry calls in the bye-going at houses farther down the glen, and was in a mellow humour, jerked a finger over his shoulder towards the girl as she stood hesitating in the hall after a few words with my father and me, and said, “I’ve brought you a good harvester here, Colin, and she’ll give you a day’s darg for a kiss.”
I stammered a stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on so warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity.
Mistress Betty coloured and bit her lip.
“Look at the hussy!” said her father again, laughing with heaving shoulders. “‘Where shall we go to-day on our rounds?’ said I; ‘Where but to Elrigmore,’ said she; ‘I have not seen Colin for an age!’ Yet I’ll warrant you thought the cunning jade shy of a gentleman soldier! Ah, those kirtles, those kirtles! I’ll give you a word of wisdom, sir, you never learned in Glascow Hie Street nor in the army.”
I looked helplessly after the girl, who had fled, incontinent, to the women at work in the field.
“Well, sir,” I said, “I shall be pleased to hear it. If it has any pertinence to the harvesting of a second crop it would be welcome.”
My father sighed. He never entered very heartily into diversion nowadays—small wonder!—so the Provost laughed on with his counsel.
“You know very well it has nothing to do with harvesting nor harrowing,” he cried; “I said kirtles, didn’t I! And you needn’t be so coy about the matter; surely to God you never learned modesty at your trade of sacking towns. Many a wench——”
“About this counsel,” I put in; “I have no trick or tale of wenchcraft beyond the most innocent. And beside, sir, I think we were just talking of a lady who is your daughter.”
Even in his glass he was the gentleman, for he saw the suggestion at once.
“Of course, of course, Colin,” he said hurriedly, coughing in a confusion. “Never mind an old fool’s havering.” Then said he again, “There’s a boy at many an old man’s heart. I saw you standing there and my daughter was yonder, and it just came over me like the verse of a song that I was like you when I courted her mother. My sorrow! it looks but yesterday, and yet here’s an old done man! Folks have been born and married (some of them) and died since syne, and I’ve been going through life with my eyes shut to my own antiquity. It came on me like a flash three minutes ago, that this gross oldster, sitting of a Saturday sipping the good aqua of Elrigmore, with a pendulous waistcoat and a wrinkled hand, is not the lad whose youth and courtship you put me in mind of.”
“Stretch your hand, Provost, and fill your glass,” said my father. He was not merry in his later years, but he had a hospitable heart.
The two of them sat dumb a space, heedless of the bottle or me, and at last, to mar their manifest sad reflections, I brought the Provost back to the topic of his counsel.
“You had a word of advice,” I said, very softly. There was a small tinge of pleasure in my guess that what he had to say might have reference to his daughter.
“Man! I forget now,” he said, rousing himself. “What were we on?”
“Harvesting,” said father.
“No, sir; kirtles,” said I.
“Kirtles—so it was,” said the Provost. “My wife at Betty’s age, when I first sought her company, was my daughter’s very model, in face and figure.”
“She was a handsome woman, Provost,” said my father. “I can well believe it,” said I. “She is that to-day,” cried the Provost, pursing his lips and lifting up his chin in a challenge. “And I learned one thing at the courting of her which is the gist of my word of wisdom to you, Colin. Keep it in mind till you need it. It’s this: There’s one thing a woman will put up with blandly in every man but the one man she has a notion of, and that’s the absence of conceit about himself or her.” In the field by the river, the harvesters sat at a mid-day meal, contentedly eating their bannock and cheese. They were young folks all, at the age when toil and plain living but give a zest to the errant pleasures of life, so they filled their hour of leisure with gallivanting among the mown and gathered grass. And oh! mo chridhe, but that was long ago! Let no one, remembering the charm of an autumn field in his youth, test its cheerfulness when he has got up in years. For he will find it lying under a sun less genial than then; he will fret at some influence lost; the hedges tall and beautiful will have turned to stunted boundaries upon his fancy; he will ache at the heart at the memory of those old careless crops and reapers when he sits, a poor man or wealthy, among the stubble of grass and youth.
As I lay on the shady side of an alder bank watching our folk at their gambols, I found a serenity that again set me at my ease with the Provost’s daughter. I gathered even the calmness to invite her to sit beside me, and she made no demur.
“You are short of reapers, I think, by the look of them,” she said; “I miss some of the men who were here last year.”
They were gone with MacCailein, I explained, as paid volunteers.
“Oh! those wars!” she cried sadly. “I wish they were ended. Here are the fields, good crops, food and happiness for all, why must men be fighting?”
“Ask your Highland heart,” said I. “We are children of strife.”
“In my heart,” she replied, “there’s but love for all. I toss sleepless, at night, thinking of the people we know—the good, kind, gallant; merry lads we know—waging savage battle for something I never had the wit to discover the meaning of.”
“The Almighty’s order—we have been at it from the birth of time.”
“So old a world might have learned,” she said, “to break that order when they break so many others. Is his lordship likely to be back soon?”
“I wish he might be,” said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the heather above the myrtle and MacCailein’s head on a post “Did you hear of the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?”
“Yes,” she said; “an ugly business! What has that to do with MacCailein’s home-coming?”
“Very little indeed,” I answered, recalling our bond; “but she cursed his lordship and his army with a zeal that was alarming, even to an old soldier of Sweden.”
“God ward all evil!” cried Betty in a passion of earnestness. “You’ll be glad to see your friend M’Iver back, I make no doubt.”
“Oh! he’s an old hand at war, madam; he’ll come safe out of this by his luck and skill, if he left the army behind him.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said she, smiling.
“What!” I cried in raillery; “would you be grateful for so poor a balance left of a noble army?”
And she reddened and smiled again, and a servant cried us in to the dinner-table.
In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home in the fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter, the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by the Lowlands, where he had a mission to the Estates. The war, for the time, was over, a truce of a kind was patched up, and there was a cheerful prospect—too briefly ours—that the country would settle anon to peace.