Hard on the heels of the snow came a frost that put shackles on the very wind. It fell black and sudden on the country, turning the mud floors of the poorer dwellings into iron that rang below the heel, though the peat-fires burned by day and night, and Loch Finne, lying flat as a girdle from shore to shore, crisped and curdled into ice on the surface in the space of an afternoon. A sun almost genial to look at, but with no warmth at the heart of him, rode among the white hills that looked doubly massive with their gullies and cornes, for ordinary black or green, lost in the general hue, and at mid-day bands of little white birds would move over the country from the north, flapping weakly to a warmer clime. They might stay a little, some of them, deceived by the hanging peat-smoke into the notion that somewhere here were warmth and comfort; but the cold searched them to the core, and such as did not die on the roadside took up their dismal voyaging anew.
The very deer came down from the glens—cabarfeidh stags, hinds, and prancing roes. At night we could hear them bellowing and snorting as they went up and down the street in herds from Ben Bhrec or the barren sides of the Black Mount and Dalness in the land of Bredalbane, seeking the shore and the travellers’ illusion—the content that’s always to come. In those hours, too, the owls seemed to surrender the fir-woods and come to the junipers about the back-doors, for they keened in the darkness, even on, woeful warders of the night, telling the constant hours.
Twas in these bitter nights, shivering under blanket and plaid, I thought ruefully of foreign parts, of the frequented towns I had seen elsewhere, the cleanly paven streets, swept of snow, the sea-coal fires, and the lanterns swinging over the crowded causeways, signs of friendly interest and companionship. Here were we, poor peasants, in a waste of frost and hills, cut off from the merry folks sitting by fire and flame at ease! Even our gossiping, our ceilidh in each other’s houses, was stopped; except in the castle itself no more the song and story, the pipe and trump.
In the morning when one ventured abroad he found the deer-slot dimpling all the snow on the street, and down at the shore, unafeared of man, would be solitary hinds, widows and rovers from their clans, sniffing eagerly over to the Cowal hills. Poor beasts! poor beasts! I’ve seen them in their madness take to the ice for it when it was little thicker than a groat, thinking to reach the oak-woods of Ardchyline. For a time the bay at the river mouth was full of long-tailed ducks, that at a whistle almost came to your hand, and there too came flocks of wild-swan, flying in wedges, trumpeting as they flew. Fierce otters quarrelled over their eels at the mouth of the Black Burn that flows underneath the town and out below the Tolbooth to the shore, or made the gloaming melancholy with their doleful whistle. A roebuck in his winter jacket of mouse-brown fur died one night at my relative’s door, and a sea-eagle gorged himself so upon the carcass that at morning he could not flap a wing, and fell a ready victim to a knock from my staff.
The passes to the town were head-high with drifted snow, our warders at the heads of Aora and Shira could not themselves make out the road, and the notion of added surety this gave us against Antrim’s Irishmen was the only compensation for the ferocity of nature.
In three days the salt loch, in that still and ardent air, froze like a fishpond, whereupon the oddest spectacle ever my country-side saw was his that cared to rise at morning to see it. Stags and hinds in tremendous herds, black cattle, too, from the hills, trotted boldly over the ice to the other side of the loch, that in the clarity of the air seemed but a mile off. Behind them went skulking foxes, pole-cats, badgers, cowering hares, and bead-eyed weasels. They seemed to have a premonition that Famine was stalking behind them, and they fled our luckless woods and fields like rats from a sinking ship.
To Master Gordon I said one morning as we watched a company of dun heifers mid-way on the loch, “This is an ill omen or I’m sore mistaken.”
He was not a man given to superstitions, but he could not gainsay me. “There’s neither hip nor haw left in our woods,” he said; “birds I’ve never known absent here in the most eager winters are gone, and wild-eyed strangers, their like never seen here before, tamely pick crumbs at my very door. Signs! signs! It beats me sometimes to know how the brute scents the circumstance to come, but—whats the Word?—‘Not a sparrow shall fall.’”
We fed well on the wild meat driven to our fireside, and to it there never seemed any end, for new flocks took up the tale of the old ones, and a constant procession of fur and feather moved across our white prospect. Even the wolf—from Benderloch no doubt—came baying at night at the empty gibbets at the town-head, that spoke of the law’s suspense.
Only in Castle Inneraora was there anything to be called gaiety. MacCailein fumed at first at the storm that kept his letters from him and spoiled the laburnums and elms he was coaxing to spring about his garden; but soon he settled down to his books and papers, ever his solace in such homely hours as the policy and travel of his life permitted. And if the burgh was dull and dark, night after night there was merriment over the drawbrig of the castle. It would be on the 10th or the 15th of the month that I first sampled it I went up with a party from the town and neighbourhood, with their wives and daughters, finding an atmosphere wondrous different from that of the cooped and anxious tenements down below. Big logs roared behind the fire-dogs, long candles and plenty lit the hall, and pipe and harp went merrily. Her ladyship had much of the French manner—a dainty dame with long thin face and bottle shoulders, attired always in Saxon fashion, and indulgent in what I then thought a wholesome levity, that made up for the Gruamach husband. And she thought him, honestly, the handsomest and noblest in the world, though she rallied him for his overmuch sobriety of deportment. To me she was very gracious, for she had liked my mother, and I think she planned to put me in the way of the Provost’s daughter as often as she could.
When his lordship was in his study, our daffing was in Gaelic, for her ladyship, though a Morton, and only learning the language, loved to have it spoken about her. Her pleasure was to play the harp—a clarsach of great beauty, with Iona carving on it—to the singing of her daughter Jean, who knew all the songs of the mountains and sang them like the bird. The town girls, too, sang, Betty a little shyly, but as daintily as her neighbours, and we danced a reel or two to the playing of Paruig Dall, the blind piper. Venison and wine were on the board, and whiter bread than the town baxters afforded. It all comes back on me now—that lofty hall, the skins of seal and otter and of stag upon the floor, the flaring candles and the glint of glass and silver, the banners swinging upon the walls over devices of pike, gun, and claymore—the same to be used so soon!
The castle, unlike its successor, sat adjacent to the river-side, its front to the hill of Dunchuach on the north, and its back a stone-cast from the mercat cross and the throng street of the town. Between it and the river was the small garden consecrate to her ladyship’s flowers, a patch of level soil, cut in dice by paths whose tiny pebbles and broken shells crunched beneath the foot at any other season than now when the snow covered all.
John Splendid, who was of our party, in a lull of the entertainment was looking out at the prospect from a window at the gable end of the hall, for the moon sailed high above Strone, and the outside world was beautiful in a cold and eerie fashion. Of a sudden he faced round and beckoned to me with a hardly noticeable toss of the head.
I went over and stood beside him. He was bending a little to get the top of Dunchuach in the field of his vision, and there was a puzzled look on his face.
“Do you see any light up yonder?” he asked, and I followed his query with a keen scrutiny of the summit, where the fort should be lying in darkness and peace.
There was a twinkle of light that would have shown fuller if the moonlight were less.
“I see a spark,” I said, wondering a little at his interest in so small an affair.
“That’s a pity,” said he, in a rueful key. “I was hoping it might be a private vision of my own, and yet I might have known my dream last night of a white rat meant something. If that’s flame there’s more to follow. There should be no lowe on this side of the fort after nightfall, unless the warders on the other side have news from the hills behind Dunchuach. In this matter of fire at night Dunchuach echoes Ben Bhuidhe or Ben Bhrec, and these two in their turn carry on the light of our friends farther ben in Bredalbane and Cruachan. It’s not a state secret to tell you we were half feared some of our Antrim gentry might give us a call; but the Worst Curse on the pigs who come guesting in such weather!”
He was glowering almost feverishly at the hill-top, and I turned round to see that the busy room had no share in our apprehension. The only eyes I found looking in our direction were those of Betty, who finding herself observed, came over, blushing a little, and looked out into the night.
“You were hiding the moonlight from me,” she said with a smile, a remark which struck me as curious, for she could not, from where she sat, see out at the window.
“I never saw one who needed it less,” said Splendid, and still he looked intently at the mount. “You carry your own with you.”
Having no need to bend, she saw the top of Dun-chuach whenever she got close to the window, and by this time the light on it looked like a planet, wan in the moonlight, but unusually large and angry.
“I never saw star so bright,” said the girl, in a natural enough error.
“A challenge to your eyes, madam,” retorted Splendid again, in a raillery wonderful considering his anxiety, and he whispered in my ear—“or to us to war.”
As he spoke, the report of a big gun boomed through the frosty air from Dunchuach to the plain, and the beacon flashed up, tall, flaunting, and unmistakable.
John Splendid turned into the hall and raised his voice a little, to say with no evidence of disturbance—
“There’s something amiss up the glens, your ladyship.”
The harp her ladyship strummed idly on at the moment had stopped on a ludicrous and unfinished note, the hum of conversation ended abruptly. Up to the window the company crowded, and they could see the balefire blazing hotly against the cool light of the moon and the widely sprinkled stars. Behind them in a little came Argile, one arm only thrust hurriedly in a velvet jacket, his hair in a disorder, the pallor of study on his cheek. He very gently pressed to the front, and looked out with a lowering brow at the signal.
“Ay, ay!” he said in the English, after a pause that kept the room more intent on his face than on the balefire. “My old luck bides with me. I thought the weather guaranteed me a season’s rest, but here’s the claymore again! Alasdair, Craignish, Sir Donald, I wish you gentlemen would set the summons about with as little delay as need be. We have no time for any display of militant science, but as these beacons carry their tale fast we may easily be at the head of Glen Aora before the enemy is down Glenurchy.”
Sir Donald, who was the eldest of the officers his lordship addressed, promised a muster of five hundred men in three hours’ time. “I can have a crois-tara,” he said, “at the very head of Glen Shira in an hour.”
“You may save yourself the trouble,” said John Splendid; “Glen Shira’s awake by this time, for the watchers have been in the hut on Ben Bhuidhe since ever we came back from Lorn, and they are in league with other watchers at the Gearron town, who will have the alarm miles up the Glen by now if I make no mistake about the breed.”
By this time a servant came in to say Sithean Sluaidhe hill on Cowal was ablaze, and likewise the hill of Ardno above the Ardkinglas lands.
“The alarm will be over Argile in two hours,” said his lordship. “We’re grand at the beginnings of things,” and as he spoke he was pouring, with a steady hand, a glass of wine for a woman in the tremors. “I wish to God we were better at the endings,” he added, bitterly. “If these Athole and Antrim caterans have the secret of our passes, we may be rats in a trap before the morn’s morning.”
The hall emptied quickly, a commotion of folks departing rose in the courtyard, and candle and torch moved about. Horses put over the bridge at a gallop, striking sparks from the cobble-stones, swords jingled on stirrups. In the town, a piper’s tune hurriedly lifted, and numerous lights danced to the windows of the burghers. John Splendid, the Marquis, and I were the only ones left in the hall, and the Marquis turned to me with a smile—
“You see your pledge calls for redemption sooner than you expected, Elrigmore. The enemy’s not far from Ben Bhuidhe now, and your sword is mine by the contract.”
“Your lordship can count on me to the last ditch,” I cried; and indeed I might well be ready, for was not the menace of war as muckle against my own hearth as against his?
“Our plan,” he went on, “as agreed upon at a council after my return from the north, was to hold all above Inneraora in simple defence while lowland troops took the invader behind. Montrose or the Mac Donalds can’t get through our passes.”
“I’m not cock-sure of that, MacCailein,” said Splendid. “We’re here in the bottom of an ashet; there’s more than one deserter from your tartan on the outside of it, and once they get on the rim they have, by all rules strategic, the upper hand of us in some degree. I never had much faith (if I dare make so free) in the surety of our retreat here. It’s an old notion of our grandads that we could bar the passes.”
“So we can, sir, so we can!” said the Marquis, nervously picking at his buttons with his long white fingers, the nails vexatiously polished and shaped.
“Against horse and artillery, I allow, surely not against Gaelic foot. This is not a wee foray of broken men, but an attack by an army of numbers. The science of war—what little I learned of it in the Low Countries with gentlemen esteemed my betters—convinces me that if a big enough horde fall on from the rim of our ashet, as I call it, they might sweep us into the loch like rattons.”
I doubt MacCailein Mor heard little of this uncheery criticism, for he was looking in a seeming blank abstraction out of the end window at the town lights increasing in number as the minutes passed. His own piper in the close behind the buttery had tuned up and into the gathering—
“Bha mi air banais ‘am bail’ Inneraora. Banais bu mhiosa bha riamh air an t-saoghal!”
I felt the tune stir me to the core, and M’Iver, I could see by the twitch of his face, kindled to the old call.
“Curse them!” cried MacCailein; “Curse them!” he cried in the Gaelic, and he shook a white fist foolishly at the north; “I’m wanting but peace and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be snapping like curs at Argile. God’s name! and I’ll crush them like ants on the ant-heap.”
From the door at the end of the room, as he stormed, a little bairn toddled in, wearing a night-shirt, a curly gold-haired boy with his cheeks like the apple for hue, the sleep he had risen from still heavy on his eyes. Seemingly the commotion had brought him from his bed, and up he now ran, and his little arms went round his father’s knees. On my word I’ve seldom seen a man more vastly moved than was Archibald, Marquis of Argile. He swallowed his spittle as if it were wool, and took the child to his arms awkwardly, like one who has none of the handling of his own till they are grown up, and I could see the tear at the cheek he laid against the youth’s ruddy hair.
“Wild men coming!” said the child, not much put about after all.
“They shan’t touch my little Illeasbuig,” whispered his lordship, kissing him on the mouth. Then he lifted his head and looked hard at John Splendid. “I think,” he said, “if I went post-haste to Edinburgh, I could be of some service in advising the nature and route of the harassing on the rear of Montrose. Or do you think—do you think——?”
He ended in a hesitancy, flushing a little at the brow, his lips weakening at the corner.
John Splendid, at my side, gave me with his knee the least nudge on the leg next him.
“Did your lordship think of going to Edinburgh at once?” he asked, with an odd tone in his voice, and keeping his eyes very fixedly on a window.
“If it was judicious, the sooner the better,” said the Marquis, nuzzling his face in the soft warmth of the child’s neck.
Splendid looked helpless for a bit, and then took up the policy that I learned later to expect from him in every similar case. He seemed to read (in truth it was easy enough!) what was in his master’s mind, and he said, almost with gaiety—
“The best thing you could do, my lord. Beyond your personal encouragement (and a Chiefs aye a consoling influence on the field, I’ll never deny), there’s little you could do here that cannot, with your pardon, be fairly well done by Sir Donald and myself, and Elrigmore here, who have made what you might call a trade of tulzie and brulzie.”
MacCailein Mor looked uneasy for all this open assurance. He set the child down with an awkward kiss, to be taken away by a servant lass who had come after him.
“Would it not look a little odd!” he said, eyeing us keenly.
“Your lordship might be sending a trusty message to Edinburgh,” I said; and John Splendid with a “Pshaw!” walked to the window, saying what he had to say with his back to the candle-light.
“There’s not a man out there but would botch the whole business if you sent him,” he said; “it must be his lordship or nobody. And what’s to hinder her ladyship and the children going too? Snugger they’d be by far in Stirling Lodge than here, I’ll warrant. If I were not an old runt of a bachelor, it would be my first thought to give my women and bairns safety.”
MacCailein flew at the notion. “Just so, just so,” he cried, and of a sudden he skipped out of the room.
John Splendid turned, pushed the door to after the nobleman, and in a soft voice broke into the most terrible torrent of bad language ever I heard (and I’ve known cavaliers of fortune free that way). He called his Marquis everything but a man.
“Then why in the name of God do you urge him on to a course that a fool could read the poltroonery of? I never gave MacCailein Mor credit for being a coward before,” said I.
“Coward!” cried Splendid. “It’s no cowardice but selfishness—the disease, more or less, of us all. Do you think yon gentleman a coward? Then you do not know the man. I saw him once, empty-handed, in the forest, face the white stag and beat it off a hunter it was goring to death, and they say he never blenched when the bonnet was shot off his head at Drimtyne, but jested with a ‘Close on’t: a nail-breadth more, and Colin was heir to an earlhood!’”
“I’m sorry to think the worst of an Argile and a Campbell, but surely his place is here now.”
“It is, I admit; and I egged him to follow his inclination because I’m a fool in one thing, as you’ll discover anon, because ifs easier and pleasanter to convince a man to do what he wants to do than to convince him the way he would avoid is the only right one.”
“It’s not an altogether nice quirk of the character,” I said, drily. It gave me something of a stroke to find so weak a bit in a man of so many notable parts.
He spunked up like tinder.
“Do you call me a liar?” he said, with a face as white as a clout, his nostrils stretching in his rage.
“Liar!” said I, “not I. It would be an ill time to do it with our common enemy at the door. A lie (as I take it in my own Highland fashion) is the untruth told for cowardice or to get a mean advantage of another: your way with MacCailein was but a foolish way (also Highland, I’ve noticed) of saving yourself the trouble of spurring up your manhood to put him in the right.”
“You do me less than half justice,” said Splendid, the blood coming back to his face, and him smiling again; “I allow I’m no preacher. If a man must to hell, he must, his own gait. The only way I can get into argument with him about the business is to fly in a fury. If I let my temper up I would call MacCailein coward to his teeth, though I know it’s not his character. But I’ve been in a temper with my cousin before now, and I ken the stuff he’s made of: he gets as cold as steel the hotter I get, and with the poorest of causes he could then put me in a black confusion——”
“But you——”
“Stop, stop! let me finish my tale. Do you know, I put a fair face on the black business to save the man his own self-respect. He’ll know himself his going looks bad without my telling him, and I would at least leave him the notion that we were blind to his weakness. After all it’s not much of a weakness—the wish to save a wife and children from danger. Another bookish disease, I admit: their over-much study has deadened the man to a sense of the becoming, and in an affair demanding courage he acts like a woman, thinking of his household when he should be thinking of his clan. My only consolation is that after all (except for the look of the thing) his leaving us matters little.”
I thought different on that point, and I proved right. If it takes short time to send a fiery cross about, it takes shorter yet to send a naughty rumour, and the story that MacCailein Mor and his folks were off in a hurry to the Lowlands was round the greater part of Argile before the clansmen mustered at Inneraora. They never mustered at all, indeed, for the chieftains of the small companies that came from Glen Finne and down the country no sooner heard that the Marquis was off than they took the road back, and so Montrose and Colkitto MacDonald found a poltroon and deserted countryside waiting them.
Eight hours after the beacon kindled on Dunchuach, the enemy was feeling at the heart of Argile.
It came out years after, that one Angus Macalain, a Glencoe man, a branded robber off a respectable Water-of-Duglas family, had guided the main body of the invaders through the mountains of the Urchy and into our territory. They came on in three bands, Alasdair Mac-Donald and the Captain of Clanranald (as they called John MacDonald, the beast—a scurvy knave!), separating at Accurach at the forking of the two glens, and entering both, Montrose himself coming on the rear as a support As if to favour the people of the Glens, a thaw came that day with rain and mist that cloaked them largely from view as they ran for the hills to shelter in the sheiling bothies. The ice, as I rode up the water-side, home to Glen Shira to gather some men and dispose my father safely, was breaking on the surface of the loch and roaring up on the shore in the incoming tide. It came piling in layers in the bays—a most wonderful spectacle! I could not hear my horse’s hooves for the cracking and crushing and cannonade of it as it flowed in on a south wind to the front of the Gearran, giving the long curve of the land an appearance new and terrible, filled as it was far over high-water mark with monstrous blocks, answering with groans and cries to every push of the tide.
I found the glen wrapped in mist, the Gearran hamlet empty of people, Maam, Kilblaan, Stuchgoy, and Ben Bhuidhe presenting every aspect of desolation. A weeping rain was making sodden all about my father’s house when I galloped to the door, to find him and the sgalag the only ones left.
The old man was bitter on the business.
“Little I thought,” said he, “to see the day when Glen Shira would turn tail on an enemy.”
“Where are they?” I asked, speaking of our absent followers; but indeed I might have saved the question, for I knew before he told me they were up in the conies between the mounts, and in the caves of Glen Finne.
He was sitting at a fire that was down to its grey ash, a mournful figure my heart was vexed to see. Now and then he would look about him, at the memorials of my mother, her chair and her Irish Bible (the first in the parish), and a posy of withered flowers that lay on a bowl on a shelf where she had placed them, new cut and fresh, the day she took to her deathbed. Her wheel, too, stood in the corner, with the thread snapped short in the heck—a hint, I many times thought, at the sundered interests of life.
“I suppose we must be going with the rest,” I ventured; “there’s small sense in biding here to be butchered.”
He fell in a rain of tears, fearing nor death nor hardship, I knew, but wae at the abandonment of his home. I had difficulty in getting him to consent to come with me, but at last I gave the prospect of safety in the town and the company of friends there so attractive a hue that he consented So we hid a few things under a bruach or overhanging brae beside the burn behind the house, and having shut all the doors—a comical precaution against an army, it struck me at the time—we rode down to Inneraora, to the town house of our relative Craignure.
It was a most piteous community, crowded in every lane and pend with men, women, and children dreadful of the worst All day the people had been trooping in from the landward parts, flying before the rumour of the Athole advance down Cladich. For a time there was the hope that the invaders would but follow the old Athole custom and plunder as they went, sparing unarmed men and women, but this hope we surrendered when a lad came from Camus with a tale of two old men, who were weavers there, and a woman, nailed into their huts and burned to death.
Had Inneraora been a walled town, impregnable, say, as a simple Swabian village with a few sconces and redoubts, and a few pieces of cannon, we old soldiers would have counselled the holding of it against all comers; but it was innocently open to the world, its back windows looking into the fields, its through-going wynds and closes leading frankly to the highway.
A high and sounding wind had risen from the south, the sea got in a tumult, the ice-blocks ran like sheep before it to the Gearran bay and the loch-head. I thought afterwards it must be God’s providence that opened up for us so suddenly a way of flight from this lamentable trap, by the open water now free from shore to shore in front of the town. Generalling the community as if he was a marshal of brigade, John Splendid showed me the first of his manly quality in his preparation for the removal of the women and children. He bade the men run out the fishing smacks, the wherries and skiffs, at the Cadger’s Quay, and moving about that frantic people, he disposed them in their several places on the crafts that were to carry them over the three-mile ferry to Cowal. A man born to enterprise and guidance, certes! I never saw his equal. He had the happy word for all, the magic hint of hope, a sober merriment when needed, sometimes a little raillery and laughing, sometimes (with the old) a farewell in the ear. Even the better gentry, Sir Donald and the rest, took a second place in the management, beholding in this poor gentleman the human heart that at a pinch is better than authority in a gold-braided coat.
By noon we had every bairn and woman (but for one woman I’ll mention) on their way from the shore, poor dears! tossing on the turbulent sea, the women weeping bitterly for the husbands and sons they left, for of men there went with them but the oldsters, able to guide a boat, but poorly equipped for battling with Irish banditty. And my father was among them, in the kind hands of his sgaiag and kinswomen, but in a vague indifference of grief.
A curious accident, that in the grace of God made the greatest difference on my after-life, left among them that found no place in the boats the daughter of Provost Brown. She had made every preparation to go with her father and mother, and had her foot on the beam of the boat, when an old woman set up a cry for an oe that had been forgot in the confusion, and was now, likely, crying in the solitude of the back lands. It was the love-bairn of a dead mother, brought up in the kindly Highland fashion, free of every gimel and kail-pot. Away skirted Betty up the causeway of the Cadger’s Quay, and in among the lanes for the little one, and (I learned again) she found it playing well content among puddled snow, chattering to itself in the loneliness of yon war-menaced town. And she had but snatched it up to seek safety with her in the boats when the full tide of Colkitto’s robbers came pelting in under the Arches. They cut her off from all access to the boats by that way, so she turned and made for the other end of the town, hoping to hail in her father’s skiff when he had put far enough off shore to see round the point and into the second bay.
We had but time to shout her apparent project to her father, when we found ourselves fighting hand-to-hand against the Irish gentry in trews. This was no market-day brawl, but a stark assault-at-arms. All in the sound of a high wind, broken now and then with a rain blattering even-down, and soaking through tartan and clo-dubh we at it for dear life. Of us Clan Campbell people, gentrice and commoners, and so many of the Lowland mechanics of the place as were left behind, there would be something less than two hundred, for the men who had come up the loch-side to the summon of the beacons returned the way they came when they found MacCailein gone, and hurried to the saving of wife and bairn. We were all well armed with fusil and sword, and in that we had some advantage of the caterans bearing down on us; for they had, for the main part, but rusty matchlocks, pikes, billhooks—even bows and arrows, antique enough contrivance for a time of civilised war! But they had hunger and hate for their backers, good guidance in their own savage fashion from MacDonald, and we were fighting on a half heart, a body never trained together, and stupid to the word of command.
From the first, John took the head of our poor defence. He was duine-uasail enough, and he had, notoriously, the skill that earned him the honour, even over myself (in some degree), and certainly over Sir Donald.
The town-head fronted the upper bay, and between it and the grinding ice on the shore lay a broad tract of what might be called esplanade, presenting ample space for our encounter.
“Gentlemen,” cried John, picking off a man with the first shot from a silver-butted dag he pulled out of his waist-belt at the onset, “and with your leave, Sir Donald (trusting you to put pluck in these Low Country shopkeepers), it’s Inneraora or Ifrinn for us this time. Give them cold steel, and never an inch of arm-room for their bills!”
Forgotten were the boats, behind lay all our loves and fortunes—was ever Highland heart but swelled on such a time? Sturdy black and hairy scamps the Irish—never German boor so inelegant—but venomous in their courage! Score upon score of them ran in on us through the Arches. Our lads had but one shot from the muskets, then into them with the dirk and sword.
“Montrose! Montrose!” cried the enemy, even when the blood glucked at the thrapple, and they twisted to the pain of the knife.
“A papist dog!” cried Splendid, hard at it on my right, for once a zealous Protestant, and he was whisking around him his broadsword like a hazel wand, facing half-a-dozen Lochaber-axes. “Cruachan, Cruachan!” he sang. And we cried the old slogan but once, for time pressed and wind was dear.
Sitting cosy in taverns with friends long after, listening to men singing in the cheery way of taverns the ditty that the Leckan bard made upon this little spulzie, I could weep and laugh in turns at minding of yon winter’s day. In the hot stress of it I felt but the ardour that’s in all who wear tartan—less a hatred of the men I thrust and slashed at with Sir Claymore than a zest in the busy traffic, and something of a pride (God help me!) in the pretty way my blade dirled on the ham-pans of the rascals. There was one trick of the sword I had learned off an old sergeant of pikes in Macka’s Scots, in a leisure afternoon in camp, that I knew was alien to every man who used the targe in home battles, and it served me like a Mull wife’s charm. They might be sturdy, the dogs, valorous too, for there’s no denying the truth, and they were gleg, gleg with the target in fending, but, man, I found them mighty simple to the feint and lunge of Alasdair Mor!
Listening, as I say, to a song in a tavern, I’m sad for the stout fellows of our tartan who fell that day, and still I could laugh gaily at the amaze of the ragged corps who found gentlemen before them. They pricked at us, for all their natural ferocity, with something like apology for marring our fine clothes; and when the end came, and we were driven back, they left the gentlemen of our band to retreat by the pends to the beech-wood, and gave their attention to the main body of our common townsmen.
We had edged, Splendid and Sir Donald and I, into a bit of green behind the church, and we held a council of war on our next move.
Three weary men, the rain smirring on our sweating, faces, there we were! I noticed that a trickle of blood was running down my wrist, and I felt at the same time a beat at the shoulder that gave the explanation, and had mind that a fellow in the Athole corps had fired a pistolet point-blank at me, missing me, as I had thought, by the thickness of my doublet-sleeve.
“You’ve got a cut,” said Sir Donald. “You have a face like the clay.”
“A bit of the skin off,” said I, unwilling to vex good company.
“We must take to Eas-a-chosain for it,” said Splendid, his eyes flashing wild upon the scene, the gristle of his red neck throbbing.
Smoke was among the haze of the rain; from the thatch of the town-head houses the wind brought on us the smell of burning heather and brake and fir-joist.
“Here’s the lamentable end of town Inneraora!” said John, in a doleful key.
And we ran, the three of us, up the Fisherland burn side to the wood of Creag Dubh.
We made good speed up the burn-side, through the fields, and into the finest forest that was (or is to this day, perhaps) in all the wide Highlands. I speak of Creag Dubh, great land of majestic trees, home of the red-deer, rich with glades carpeted with the juiciest grass, and endowed with a cave or two where we knew we were safe of a sanctuary if it came to the worst, and the Athole men ran at our heels. It welcomed us from the rumour of battle with a most salving peace. Under the high fir and oak we walked in a still and scented air, aisles lay about and deep recesses, the wind sang in the tops and in the vistas of the trees, so that it minded one of Catholic kirks frequented otherwhere. We sped up by the quarries and through Eas-a-chosain (that little glen so full of fondest memorials for all that have loved and wandered), and found our first resting-place in a cunning little hold on an eminence looking down on the road that ran from the town to Coillebhraid mines. Below us the hillside dipped three or four hundred feet in a sharp slant bushed over with young darach wood; behind us hung a tremendous rock that few standing upon would think had a hollow heart Here was our refuge, and the dry and stoury alleys of the fir-wood we had traversed gave no clue of our track to them that might hunt us.
We made a fire whose smoke curled out at the back of the cave into a linn at the bottom of a fall the Cromalt burn has here, and had there been any to see the reek they would have thought it but the finer spray of the thawed water rising among the melting ice-lances. We made, too, couches of fir-branches—the springiest and most wholesome of beds in lieu of heather or gall, and laid down our weariness as a soldier would relinquish his knapsack, after John Splendid had bandaged my wounded shoulder.
In the cave of Eas-a-chosain we lay for more days than I kept count of, I immovable, fevered with my wound, Sir Donald my nurse, and John Splendid my provider. They kept keen scrutiny on the road below, where sometimes they could see the invaders passing in bands in their search for scattered townships or crofts.
On the second night John ventured into the edge of the town to see how fared Inneraora and to seek provand. He found the place like a fiery cross,—burned to char at the ends, and only the mid of it—the solid Tolbooth and the gentle houses—left to hint its ancient pregnancy. A corps of Irish had it in charge while their comrades scoured the rest of the country, and in the dusk John had an easy task to find brandy in the cellars of Craig-nure (the invaders never thought of seeking a cellar for anything more warming than peats), a boll of meal in handfuls here and there among the meal-girnels of the commoner houses that lay open to the night, smelling of stale hearth-fires, and harried.
To get fresh meat was a matter even easier, though our guns we dare not be using, for there were blue hares to snare, and they who have not taken fingers to a roasted haunch of badger harried out of his hiding with a club have fine feeding yet to try. The good Gaelic soldier will eat, sweetly, crowdy made in his brogue—how much better off were we with the stout and well-fired oaten cakes that this Highland gentleman made on the flagstone in front of our cave-fire!
Never had a wounded warrior a more rapid healing than I. “Ruigidh an ro-ghiullach air an ro-ghalar”—good nursing will overcome the worst disease, as our antique proverb says, and I had the best of nursing and but a baggage-master’s wound after all. By the second week I was hale and hearty. We were not uncomfortable in our forest sanctuary; we were well warmed by the perfumed roots of the candle-fir; John Splendid’s foraging was richer than we had on many a campaign, and a pack of cartes lent some solace to the heaviest of our hours. To our imprisonment we brought even a touch of scholarship. Sir Donald was a student of Edinburgh College—a Master of Arts—learned in the moral philosophies, and he and I discoursed most gravely of many things that had small harmony with our situation in that savage foe-haunted countryside.
To these, our learned discourses, John Splendid would listen with an impatient tolerance, finding in the most shrewd saying of the old scholars we dealt with but a paraphrase of some Gaelic proverb or the roundabout expression of his own views on life and mankind.
“Tuts! tuts!” he would cry, “I think the dissensions of you two are but one more proof of the folly of book-learning. Your minds are not your own, but the patches of other people’s bookish duds. A keen eye, a custom of puzzling everything to its cause, a trick of balancing the different motives of the human heart, get John M’Iver as close on the bone when it comes to the bit. Every one of the scholars you are talking of had but my own chance (maybe less, for who sees more than a Cavalier of fortune?) of witnessing the real true facts of life. Did they live to-day poor and hardy, biting short at an oaten bannock to make it go the farther, to-morrow gorging on fat venison and red rich wine? Did they parley with cunning lawyers, cajole the boor, act the valorous on a misgiving heart, guess at the thought of man or woman oftener than we do? Did ever you find two of them agree on the finer points of their science? Never the bit!”
We forgave him his heresies for the sake of their wit, that I but poorly chronicle, and he sang us wonderful Gaelic songs that had all of that same wisdom he bragged of—no worse, I’ll allow, than the wisdom of print; not all love-songs, laments, or such naughty ballads as you will hear to-day, but the poetry of the more cunning bards. Our cavern, in its inner recesses, filled with the low rich chiming of his voice; his face, and hands, and whole body took part in the music. In those hours his character borrowed just that touch of sincerity it was in want of at ordinary times, for he was one of those who need trial and trouble to bring out their better parts.
We might have been happy, we might have been content, living thus in our cave the old hunter’s life; walking out at early mornings in the adjacent parts of the wood for the wherewithal to breakfast; rounding in the day with longer journeys in the moonlight, when the shadows were crowded with the sounds of night bird and beast;—we might have been happy, I say, but for thinking of our country’s tribulation. Where were our friends and neighbours? Who were yet among the living? How fared our kin abroad in Cowal or fled farther south to the Rock of Dunbarton? These restless thoughts came oftener to me than to my companions, and many an hour I spent in woeful pondering in the alleys of the wood.
At last it seemed the Irish who held the town were in a sure way to discover our hiding if we remained any longer there. Their provender was running low, though they had driven hundreds of head of cattle before them down the Glens; the weather hardened to frost again, and they were pushing deeper into the wood to seek for bestial. It was full of animals we dare not shoot, but which they found easy to the bullet; red-deer with horns—even at three years old—stunted to knobs by a constant life in the shade and sequestration of the trees they threaded their lives through, or dun-bellied fallow-deer unable to face the blasts of the exposed hills, light-coloured yeld hinds and hornless “heaviers” (or winterers) the size of oxen. A flock or two of wild goat, even, lingered on the upper slopes towards Ben Bhrec, and they were down now browsing in the ditches beside the Marriage Tree.
We could see little companies of the enemy come closer and closer on our retreat each day—attracted up the side of the hill from the road by birds and beast that found cover under the young oaks.
“We’ll have to be moving before long,” said Sir Donald, ruefully looking at them one day—so close at hand that we unwittingly had our fingers round the dirk-hilts.
He had said the true word.
It was the very next day that an Irishman, bending under a bush to lift a hedgehog that lay sleeping its winter sleep tightly rolled up in grass and bracken, caught sight of the narrow entrance to our cave. Our eyes were on him at the time, and when he came closer we fell back into the rear of our dark retreat, thinking he might not push his inquiry further.
For once John Splendid’s cunning forsook him in the most ludicrous way. “I could have stabbed him where he stood,” he said afterwards, “for I was in the shadow at his elbow;” but he forgot that the fire whose embers glowed red within the cave would betray its occupation quite as well as the sight of its occupants, and that we were discovered only struck him when the man, after but one glance in, went bounding down the hill to seek for aid in harrying this nest of ours.
It was “Bundle and Go” on the bagpipes. We hurried to the top of the hill and along the ridge just inside the edge of the pines in the direction of the Aora, apprehensive that at every step we should fall upon bands of the enemy, and if we did not come upon themselves, we came upon numerous enough signs of their employment. Little farms lay in the heart of the forest of Creag Dubh,—or rather more on the upper edge of it,—their fields scalloped into the wood, their hills a part of the mountains that divide Loch Finne from Lochow. To-day their roof-trees lay humbled on the hearth, the gable-walls stood black and eerie, with the wind piping between the stones, the cabars or joists held charred arms to heaven, like poor martyrs seeking mercy. Nothing in or about these once happy homesteads, and the pertinents and pendicles near them, had been spared by the robbers.
But we had no time for weeping over such things as we sped on our way along the hillside for Dunchuach, the fort we knew impregnable and sure to have safety for us if we could get through the cordon that was bound to be round it.
It was a dull damp afternoon, an interlude in the frost, chilly and raw in the air, the forest filled with the odours of decaying leaves and moss. The greater part of our way lay below beechwood neither thick nor massive, giving no protection from the rain to the soil below it, so that we walked noisily and uncomfortably in a mash of rotten vegetation. We were the length of the Cherry Park, moving warily, before our first check came. Here, if possible, it were better we should leave the wood and cut across the mouth of the Glen to Dunchuach on the other side. But there was no cover to speak of in that case. The river Aora, plopping and crying on its hurried way down, had to be crossed, if at all, by a wooden bridge, cut at the parapets in the most humorous and useless way in embrasures, every embrasure flanked by port-holes for musketry—a laughable pretence about an edifice in itself no stronger against powder than a child’s toy.
On the very lowest edges of the wood, in the shade of a thick plump of beech, strewed generously about the foot by old bushes of whin and bramble, we lay at last studying the open country before us, and wondering how we should win across it to the friendly shelter of Dunchuach. Smoke was rising from every chimney in the castle, which, with its moat and guns, and its secret underground passage to the seashore, was safe against surprises or attacks through all this disastrous Antrim occupation. But an entrance to the castle was beyond us; there was nothing for it but Dunchuach, and it cheered us wonderfully too, that from the fort there floated a little stream of domestic reek, white-blue against the leaden grey of the unsettled sky.
“Here we are, dears, and yonder would we be,” said John, digging herb-roots with his knife and chewing them in an abstraction of hunger, for we had been disturbed at a meal just begun to.
I could see a man here and there between us and the lime-kiln we must pass on our way up Dunchuach. I confessed myself in as black a quandary as ever man experienced. As for Sir Donald—good old soul!—he was now, as always, unable to come to any conclusion except such as John Splendid helped him to.
We lay, as I say, in the plump, each of us under his bush, and the whole of us overhung a foot or two by a brow of land bound together by the spreading beech-roots. To any one standing on the bruach we were invisible, but a step or two would bring him round to the foot of our retreat and disclose the three of us.
The hours passed, with us ensconced there—every hour the length of a day to our impatience and hunger; but still the way before was barred, for the coming and going of people in the valley was unceasing. We had talked at first eagerly in whispers, but at last grew tired of such unnatural discourse, and began to sleep in snatches for sheer lack of anything eke to do. It seemed we were prisoned there till nightfall at least, if the Athole man who found our cave did not track us to our hiding.
I lay on the right of my two friends, a little more awake, perhaps, than they, and so I was the first to perceive a little shaking of the soil, and knew that some one was coming down upon our hiding. We lay tense, our breathing caught at the chest, imposing on ourselves a stillness that swelled the noises of nature round about us—the wind, the river, the distant call of the crows—to a most clamorous and appalling degree.
We could hear our visitor breathing as he moved about cautiously on the stunted grass above us, and so certain seemed discovery that we had our little black knives lying naked along our wrists.
The suspense parched me at the throat till I thought the rasping of my tongue on the roof of my palate seemed like the scraping of a heath-brush in a wooden churn. Unseen we were, we knew, but it was patent that the man above us would be round in front of us at any moment, and there we were to his plain eyesight! He was within three yards of a steel death, even had he been Fin MacCoul; but the bank he was standing on—or lying on, as we learned again—crumbled at the edge and threw him among us in a different fashion from that we had looked for.
My fingers were on his throat before I saw that we had for our visitor none other than young MacLachlan.
He had his sgian dubh almost at my stomach before our mutual recognition saved the situation.
“You’re a great stranger,” said John Splendid, with a fine pretence at more coolness than he felt, “and yet I thought Cowal side would be more to your fancy than real Argile in this vexatious time.”
“I wish to God I was on Cowal side now!” said the lad, ruefully. “At this minute I wouldn’t give a finger-length of the Loch Eck road for the whole of this rich strath.”
“I don’t suppose you were forced over here,” I commented.
“As well here in one way as another,” he said “I suppose you are unaware that Montrose and MacDonald have overrun the whole country. They have sacked and burned the greater part of Cowal; they have gone down as far as Knapdale. I could have been in safety with my own people (and the bulk of your Inneraora people too) by going to Bute or Dunbarton, but I could hardly do that with my kinsfolk still hereabouts in difficulties.”
“Where, where?” I cried; “and who do you mean?”
He coughed, in a sort of confusion, I could see, and said he spoke of the Provost and his family.
“But the Provost’s gone, man!” said I, “and his family too.”
“My cousin Betty is not gone among them,” said he; “she’s either in the castle yonder—and I hope to God she is—or a prisoner to the MacDonalds, or——”
“The Worst Curse on their tribe!” cried John Splendid, in a fervour.
Betty, it seemed, from a narrative that gave me a stound of anguish, had never managed to join her father in the boats going over to Cowal the day the MacDonalds attacked the town. Terror had seemingly sent her, carrying the child, away behind the town; for though her father and others had put ashore again at the south bay, they could not see her, and she was still unfound when the triumph of the invader made flight needful again.
“Her father would have bided too,” said MacLachlan, “but that he had reason to believe she found the safety of the castle. Lying off the quay when the light was on, some of the people in the other boats saw a woman with a burden run up the riverside to the back of the castle garden, and there was still time to get over the draw-brig then.”
MacLachlan himself had come round by the head of the loch, and by going through the Barrabhreac wood and over the shoulder of Duntorval, had taken Inneraora on the rear flank. He had lived several days in a bothy above the Beannan on High Balantyre, and, like ourselves, depended on his foraging upon the night and the luck of the woods.
We lay among the whins and bramble undisturbed till the dusk came on. The rain had stopped, a few stars sedately decked the sky. Bursts of laughing, the cries of comrades, bits of song, came on the air from the town where the Irish caroused. At last between us and Dun-chuach there seemed to be nothing to prevent us venturing on if the bridge was clear.
“If not,” said Sir Donald, “here’s a doomed old man, for I know no swimming.”
“There’s Edinburgh for you, and a gentleman’s education!” said John Splendid, with a dry laugh; and he added, “But I daresay I could do the swimming for the both of us, Sir Donald I have carried my accoutrements dry over a German river ere now, and I think I could convey you safe over yon bit burn even if it were not so shallow above the bridge as I expect it is after these long frosts.”
“I would sooner force the bridge if ten men held it,” said MacLachlan. “I have a Highland hatred of the running stream, and small notion to sleep a night in wet tartan.”
John looked at the young fellow with a struggle for tolerance. “Well, well,” he said; “we have all a touch of the fop in our youth.”
“True enough, you’re not so young as you were once,” put in MacLachlan, with a sly laugh.
“I’m twenty at the heart,” cried John,—“at the heart, man,—and do my looks make me more than twice that age? I can sing you, or run you, or dance you. What I thought was that at your age I was dandified too about my clothing. I’ll give you the benefit of believing that it’s not the small discomfort of a journey in wet tartan you vex yourself over. Have we not—we old campaigners of Lumsden’s—soaked our plaids in the running rivers of Low Germanie, and rolled them round us at night to make our hides the warmer, our sleep the snugger? Oh, the old days! Oh, the stout days! God’s name, but I ken one man who wearies of these tame and comfortable times!”
“Whether or not,” said Sir Donald, anxious to be on, “I wish the top of Dunchuach was under our brogues.”
“Allons, mes amis, then,” said John, and out we set.
Out we went, and we sped swiftly down to the bridge, feeling a sense of safety in the dark and the sound of the water that mourned in a hollow way under the wooden cabars. There was no sentinel, and we crossed dry and safely. On the other side, the fields, broken here and there by dry-stone dykes, a ditch or two, and one long thicket of shrubs, rose in a gentle ascent to the lime-kiln. We knew every foot of the way as ‘twere in our own pockets, and had small difficulty in pushing on in the dark. The night, beyond the kiln and its foreign trees, was loud with the call of white-horned owls, sounding so human sometimes that it sent the heart vaulting and brought us to pause in a flurried cluster on the path that we followed closely as it twisted up the hill.
However, we were in luck’s way for once. Never a creature challenged our progress until we landed at the north wall of the fort, and crouching in the rotten brake, cried, “Gate, oh!” to the occupants.
A stir got up within; a torch flared on the wall, and a voice asked our tartan and business.
“Is that you, Para Mor?” cried John Splendid. “It’s a time for short ceremony. Here are three or four of your closest friends terribly keen to see the inside of a wall.”
“Barbreck, is’t?” cried Para Mor, holding the flambeau over his head that he might look down on us.
“Who’s that with the red tartan?” he asked, speaking of MacLachlan, whose garments shone garish in the light beside our dull Campbell country war-cloth.
“Condemn your parley, Para Mor,” cried Sir Donald; “it’s young MacLachlan,—open your doors!”
And the gate in a little swung on its hinges to pass us in.