This mount of Dunchuach, on which we now found ourselves ensconced, rises in a cone shape to a height of about eight hundred feet, its bottom being but a matter of a quarter-mile from the castle door. It is wooded to the very nose, almost, except for the precipitous sgornach or scaur, that, seen from a distance, looks like a red wound on the face of it The fort, a square tower of extraordinarily stout masonry, with an eminent roof, had a sconce with escarpment round it, placed on the very edge of the summit. Immediately behind Dunchuach is Duntorvil, its twin peak, that, at less distance than a shout will carry, lifts a hundred feet higher on the north. The two hills make, indeed, but one, in a manner of talking, except for this hundred feet of a hollow worn by a burn lost midway in long sour grasses. It had always been a surprise to me that Argile’s grandfather, when he set the fort on the hill, chose the lower of the two eminences, contrary to all good guidance of war. But if he had not full domination on Dunchuach, he had, at any rate, a fine prospect I think, in all my time, I have never witnessed a more pleasing scene than ever presents itself in clear weather from the brow of this peak. Loch Finne—less, as the whim of the fancy might have it, a loch than a noble river—runs south in a placid band; the Cowal hills rise high on the left, bare but of heather and gall; in front is the heart of Argile, green with the forest of Creag Dubh, where the stag bays in the gloaming. For miles behind the town and castle lies a plain, flat and rich, growing the most lush crops. The town itself, that one could almost throw a stone down on, looks like a child’s toy. And away to the north and west are the abundant hills, rising higher and higher, sprinkled here and there with spots of moor loch.
The fort this night was held by a hundred men of the body called the Marquis his Halberdiers, a corps of antique heroes whose weapon for ordinary was a long axe, a pretty instrument on a parade of state, but small use, even at close quarters, with an enemy. They had skill of artillery, however, and few of them but had a Highlander’s training in the use of the broadsword. Besides two culverins mounted on the less precipitous side of the hill—which was the way we came—they had smaller firearms in galore on the sconce, and many kegs of powder disposed in a recess or magazine at the base of the tower. To the east of the tower itself, and within the wall of the fort (where now is but an old haw-tree), was a governor’s house perched on the sheer lip of the hill, so that, looking out at its window, one could spit farther than a musket-ball would carry on the level.
We were no sooner in than MacLachlan was scenting round and into this little house. He came out crestfallen, and went over to the group of halberdiers, who were noisily telling their story to myself and Splendid.
“Are no people here but men?” he asked Para Mor, who was sergeant of the company, and to all appearance in charge of the place.
He caught me looking at him in some wonder, and felt bound, seemingly, to explain himself.
“I had half the hope,” said he, “that my cousin had come here; but she’ll be in the castle after all, as her father thought.”
John Splendid gave me the pucker of an eye and a line of irony about the edge of his lips, that set my blood boiling. I was a foolish and ungoverned creature in those days of no-grace. I cried in my English, “One would think you had a goodman’s interest in this bit girl.”
MacLachlan leered at me with a most devilish light in his black eyes, and said, “Well, well, I might have even more. Marriage, they say, makes the sweetest woman wersh. But I hope you’ll not grudge me, my dear Elrigmore, some anxiety about my own relatives.”
The fellow was right enough (that was the worst of it), for a cousin’s a cousin in the friendly North; but I found myself for the second time since I came home grudging him the kinship to the Provost of Inneraora’s daughter.
That little tirravee passed, and we were soon heartily employed on a supper that had to do duty for two meals. We took it at a rough table in the tower, lighted by a flambeau that sent sparks flying like pigeons into the sombre height of the building which tapered high overhead as a lime-kiln upside down. From this retreat we could see the proof of knavery in the villages below. Far down on Knapdale, and back in the recesses of Lochow, were burning homes, to judge from the blotched sky.
Dunchuach had never yet been attacked, but that was an experience expected at any hour, and its holders were ready for it They had disposed their guns round the wall in such a way as to command the whole gut between the hills, and consequently the path up from the glens. The town side of the fort wall, and the east side, being on the sheer face (almost) of the rock, called for no artillery.
It was on the morning of the second day there that our defence was put to the test by a regiment of combined Irish and Athole men. The day was misty, with the frost in a hesitancy, a raw gowsty air sweeping over the hills. Para Mor, standing on the little north bastion or ravelin, as his post of sergeant always demanded, had been crooning a ditty and carving a scroll with his hunting-knife on a crook he would maybe use when he got back to the tack where his home was in ashes and his cattle were far to seek, when he heard a crackle of bushes at the edge of the wood that almost reached the hill-top, but falls short for lack of shelter from the sinister wind. In a second a couple of scouts in dirty red and green tartans, with fealdags or pleatless kilts on them instead of the better class philabeg, crept cannily out into the open, unsuspicious that their position could be seen from the fort.
Para Mor stopped his song, projected his firelock over the wall as he ducked his body behind it—all but an eye and shoulder—and, with a hairy cheek against the stock, took aim at the foremost The crack of the musket sounded odd and moist in the mist, failing away in a dismal slam that carried but a short distance, yet it was enough to rouse Dunchuach.
We took the wall as we stood,—myself, I remember me, in my kilt, with no jacket, and my shirt-sleeves rolled up to the shoulder; for I had been putting the stone, a pleasant Highland pastime, with John Splendid, who was similarly disaccoutred.
“All the better for business,” said he, though the raw wind, as we lined the wall, cut like sharp steel.
Para Mor’s unfortunate gentleman was the only living person to see when we looked into the gut, and he was too little that way to say much about. Para had fired for the head, but struck lower, so that the scout writhed to his end with a red-hot coal among his last morning’s viands.
Long after, it would come back to me, the oddity of that spectacle in the hollow—a man in a red fealdag, with his hide-covered buckler grotesquely flailing the grass, he, in the Gaelic custom, making a great moan about his end, and a pair of bickering rooks cawing away heartily as if it was no more than a sheep in the throes of braxy.
After a little the moan of the MacDonald stopped, the crows slanted down to the loch-side, stillness came over the place. We talked in whispers, sped about the walls on the tiptoes of our brogues, and peered wonderingly down to the edge of the wood. Long we waited and wearily, and by-and-by who came out high on the shoulder of Duntorvil but a band of the enemy, marching in good order for the summit of that paramount peak?
“I hope to God they have no large pieces with them yonder,” said John; “for they’ll have a coign there to give us trouble if once they get mother of muskets in train.”
But, fortunately for us, no artillery ever came to Duntorvil.
Fully two hundred of the enemy massed on the hill, commanded by a squat officer in breeks and wearing a peruke Anglicè, that went oddly with his tartan plaid. He was the master of Clanranald, we learned anon, a cunning person, whose aim was to avail himself of the impetuousness of the kilts he had in his corps. Gaels on the attack, as he knew, are omnipotent as God’s thunderbolts: give them a running start at a foe, with no waiting, and they might carry the gates of hell against the Worst One and all his clan; on a standing defence where coolness and discipline are wanted they have less splendid virtues. Clanranald was well aware that to take his regiment all into the hollow where his scout was stiffening was not only to expose them to the fire of the fort without giving them any chance of quick reply, but to begin the siege off anything but the bounding shoe-sole the Highlander has the natural genius for. What he devised was to try musketry at long range (and to shorten my tale, that failed), then charge from his summit, over the rushy gut, and up the side of Dunchuach, disconcerting our aim and bringing his men in on their courageous heat.
We ran back our pieces through the gorge of the bastions, wheeled them in on the terre-plein back from the wall, and cocked them higher on their trunnions to get them in train for the opposite peak.
“Boom!” went the first gun, and a bit of brown earth spat up to the left of the enemy, low by a dozen paces.
A silly patter of poor musketry made answer, but their bullets might as well have been aimed at snipe for all the difference it made to us: they came short or spattered against our wall. We could hear the shouts of the foe, and saw their confusion as our third gun sent its message into the very heart of them.
Then they charged Dunchuach.
Our artillery lost its value, and we met them with fusil and caliver.
They came on in a sort of echelon of four companies, close ordered, and not as a more skilly commander would make them, and the leading company took the right. The rushy grass met them with a swish as they bounded over it like roebucks, so fast that our few score of muskets made no impression on them until they were climbing up the steep brae that led to our walls.
Over a man in a minority, waiting, no matter how well ensconced, the onslaught of numbers carried on the wings of hate, there comes a strange feeling—I’ll never deny it—a sort of qualm at the pit of the stomach, a notion to cry parley or turn a tail disgraceful. I felt it but for a second, and then I took to my old practice of making a personal foe of one particular man in front of me. This time I chose a lieutenant or sergeant of the MacDonalds (by his tartan), a tall lean rascal, clean shaved, in trews and a tight-fitting cota gearr or short coat, with an otter-skin cap on his head, the otter-tail still attached and dangling behind like a Lowlander’s queue. He was striding along zealfully, brandishing his sword, and disdaining even to take off his back the bull-hide targe, though all his neighbours kept theirs in front of them on the left arm.
“You have wrecked honest homes!” I argued with him in my mind. “You put the torch to the widow’s thatch, you have driven the cattle from Elrigmore, and what of a girl with dark eyes like the sloe? Fancy man, man of my fancy! Oh! here’s the end of your journey!”
Our assailants, after their usual custom, dropped their pieces, such as had them, when they had fired the first shot, and risked all on the push of the target and the slash of the broad brand, confident even that our six or seven feet of escarpment would never stay their onset any time to speak of. An abattis or a fosse would have made this step futile; but as things were, it was not altogether impossible that they might surmount our low wall. Our advantage was that the terre-plein on which we stood was three or four feet higher than they were at the outer side of the wall, apart from the fact that they were poised precariously on a steep brae. We leaned calmly over the wall and spat at them with pistols now and then as they ran up the hill, with Clanranald and some captains crying them on at the flank or middle. In the plain they left a piper who had naturally not enough wind to keep his instrument going and face the hill at the same time. He strode up and down in the deadliest part of the valley where a well-sent musket ball would never lose him, and played a tune they call “The Galley of the Waves,” a Stewart rant with a hint of the zest of the sea in it Nobody thought of firing at him, though his work was an encouragement to our foes, and anon the hill-tops rang with a duel of pibrochs between him and a lad of our garrison, who got round on the top of the wall near the governor’s house and strutted high shouldered up and down, blasting at the good braggart air of “Baile Inneraora.”
Those snorting, wailing, warring pipes mingled oddly with the shout of the fighting men, who had ways of battle new to me in practice though they were in a sense my own countrymen. Gaelic slogans and maledictions they shouted, and when one of them fell in the mob, his immediate comrades never failed to stop short in their charge and coolly rob him of a silver button from his coat, or a weapon if it seemed worth while.
In a little they were soon clamouring against our wall. We laughed and prodded them off with the long-handed axes to get free play with the fusils, and one after another of them fell off, wounded or dead.
“This is the greatest folly ever I saw,” said Sir Donald, wiping his brow with a bloody hand.
“I wish I was sure there was no trick in it,” said John. He was looking around him and taking a tug at his belt, that braced him by a couple of holes. Then he spat, for luck, on a ball he dropped into his fusil, said a Glassary charm on it as he rammed home the charge and brought the butt to his cheek, aiming at a white-faced Irisher with a leathern waistcoat, who fell backward into a dub of mud and stirred no more.
“Four!” said John; “I could scarcely do better with my own French fusil Main Og.”
The enemy drew off at a command of their captain, and into the edge of the wood that came up on the left near our summit. We lost our interest in them for a time, watching a man running up the little valley from the right, above Kilmalieu. He came on waving his arms wildly and pointing ahead; but though he was plain to our view, he was out of sight of the enemy on the left.
A long black coat hampered his movements, and he looked gawky enough, stumbling through the rushes.
“If I didn’t think the inside of Castle Inneraora was too snug to quit for a deadly hillside,” said John, “I could believe yon was our friend the English minister.”
“The English minister sure enough!” said half-a-dozen beside us.
“Here’s ill-luck for us then!” cried John, with irony. “He’ll preach us to death: the fellow’s deadlier than the Clanranald ban ditty.”
Some one ran to the post beside the governor’s house, and let the gentleman in when he reached it. He was panting like a winded hound, the sweat standing in beads on his shaven jowl, and for a minute or two he could say nothing, only pointing at the back of our fort in the direction of the town.
“A parish visit, is it, sir?” asked John, still in his irony.
The minister sat him down on a log of wood and clutched his side, still pointing eagerly to the south of our fort No one could understand him, but at last he found a choked and roupy voice.
“A band behind there,” he said; “your—front—attack is—but—a—feint”
As he spoke, half-a-dozen men in a north-country tartan got on the top of our low rear wall that we thought impregnable on the lip of the hill, and came on us with a most ferocious uproar. “Badenoch!” they cried in a fashion to rend the hills, and the signal (for such it was more than slogan) brought on our other side the Clanranald gentry.
What followed in that hearthstone fight so hot and brisk took so short a space of time, and happened in so confused and terrible a moment, that all but my personal feeling escapes me. My every sense stirred with something horrible—the numb sound of a musket-butt on a head, the squeal of men wounded at the vitals, and the deeper roar of hate; a smell of blood as I felt it when a boy holding the candle at night to our shepherds slaughtering sheep in the barn at home; before the eyes a red blur cleared at intervals when I rubbed the stinging sweat from my face.
Half a hundred of those back-gait assailants were over our low wall with their axe-hooks and ladders before we could charge and prime, engaging us hand to hand in the cobbled square of our fort, at the tower foot. The harassment on this new side gave the first band of the enemy the chance to surmount our front wall, and they were not slow to take it.
Luckily our halberdiers stood firm in a mass that faced both ways, and as luckily, we had in Master John M’Iver a general of strategy and experience.
“Stand fast, Campbell Halberdiers!” he cried. “It’s bloody death, whether we take it like cravens or Gaelic gentlemen!” He laid about him with a good purpose, and whether they tried us in front or rear, the scamps found the levelled pikes and the ready swords. Some dropped beside, but more dropped before us, for the tod in a hole will face twenty times what he will flee from in the open wood, but never a man of all our striving company fought sturdier than our minister, with a weapon snatched from an Athole man he had levelled at a first blow from an oaken rung.
“The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!” he would cry; “for all the kings of the Amorites that dwell in the mountains are gathered together against us.” A slim elder man he was, ordinarily with a wan sharp face; now it was flushed and hoved in anger, and he hissed his texts through his teeth as he faced the dogs. Some of youth’s schooling was there, a Lowland youth’s training with the broadsword, for he handled it like no novice, and even M’Iver gave him “Bravo, suas e!”
That we held our ground was no great virtue—we could scarcely do less; but we did more, for soon we had our enemy driven back on the walls. They fought with a frenzy that made them ill to beat, but when a couple of scores of our lads lined the upper wall again and kept back the leak from that airt by the command of John Splendid, it left us the chance of sweeping our unwelcome tenants back again on the lower wall. They stayed stubbornly, but we had weight against them and the advantage of the little brae, and by-and-by we pinned them, like foumarts, against the stones. Most of them put back against the wall, and fought, even with the pike at their vitals, slashing empty air with sword or dirk; some got on the wall again and threw themselves over the other side, risking the chance of an uglier death on the rocks below.
In less than an hour after the shot of Para Mor (himself a stricken corpse now) rang over Dunchuach, our piper, with a gash on his face, was playing some vaunting air on the walls again, and the fort was free of the enemy, of whom the bulk had fallen back into the wood, and seemingly set out for Inneraora.
Then we gathered and stroked our dead—twenty-and-three; we put our wounded in the governor’s house, and gave them the rough leech-craft of the fighting field; the dead of the assailants we threw over the rock, and among them was a clean-shaven man in trews and a tight-fitting cota gearr, who left two halves of an otter-skin cap behind him.
“I wish to God!” cried John Splendid, “that I had a drink of Altanaluinn at this minute, or the well of Beal-loch-an-uarain.”
It was my own first thought, or something very like it, when the fighting was over, for a most cruel thirst crisped my palate, and, as ill luck had it, there was not a cup of water in the fort.
“I could be doing with a drop myself,” said the English minister. “I’ll take a stoup and go down to the well yonder and fetch it.”
He spoke of the spout in the gut, a clean little well of hill-water that, winter or summer, kept full to the lip and accessible.
We had gathered into the tower itself (all but a few sentinels), glad for a time to escape the sight of yon shambles of friend and foe that the battle had left us. The air had softened of a sudden from its piercing cold to a mildness balmy by comparison; the sky had leadened over with a menacing vapour, and over the water—in the great glen between Ben Ime and Ardno—a mist hurried to us like driving smoke. A few flakes of snow fell, lingering in the air as feathers from a nest in spring.
“Here’s a friend of Argile back again,” said an old halberdier, staunching a savage cut on his knee, and mumbling his words because he was chewing as he spoke an herb that’s the poultice for every wound.
“Frost and snow might have been Argile’s friend when that proverb was made,” said John Splendid, “but here are changed times; our last snow did not keep Colkitto on the safe side of Cladich. Still, if this be snow in earnest,” he added with a cheerier tone, “it may rid us of these vermin, who’ll find provand iller to get every extra day they bide. Where are you going, Master Gordon?”
“To the well,” said the minister, simply, stopping at the port, with a wooden stoup in his hand. “Some of our friends must be burning for a mouthful, poor dears; the wounded flesh is drouthy.”
John turned himself round on a keg he sat on, and gave a French shrug he had picked up among foreign cavaliers.
“Put it down, sir,” he said; “there’s a wheen less precious lives in this hold than a curate’s, and for the turn you did us in coming up to alarm us of the rear attack, if for nothing else, I would be sorry to see you come to any skaith. Do you not know that between us and the well there might be death half-a-dozen times? The wood, I’ll warrant, is hotching still with those disappointed warriors of Clanranald, who would have no more reverence for your life than for your Geneva bands.”
“There’s no surer cure for the disease of death in a hind than for the same murrain in a minister of the Gospel—or a landed gentleman,” said Gordon, touched in his tone a little by the austerity of his speeches as we heard them at the kirk-session.
John showed some confusion in his face, and the minister had his feet on the steps before he could answer him.
“Stop, stop!” he cried. “Might I have the honour of serving the Kirk for once? I’ll get the water from the well, minister, if you’ll go in again and see how these poor devils of ours are thriving. I was but joking when I hinted at the risk; our Athole gentry are, like enough, far off by this time.”
“I liked you better when you were selfish and told the truth, than now that you’re valiant (in a small degree) and excuse it with a lie,” quo’ the minister, and off he set.
He was beyond the wall, and stepping down the brae before we could be out at the door to look after him.
“Damn his nipped tongue!” fumed John. “But man! there’s a lovable quirk in his character too. I’ll give twenty pounds (Scots) to his kirk-plate at the first chance if he wins out of this fool’s escapade of his without injury.”
There was no doubt the minister’s task had many hazards in it, for he carried stave nor steel as he jogged on with the stoup, over the frank open brae-side, down to the well. Looking at him going down into the left of the gut as unafeared as he had come up on the right of it, I put myself in his place, and felt the skin of my back pimp-ling at the instinct of lurking enemies.
But Gordon got safely to the well, through the snow, now falling in a heavy shower, dipped out a stoupful, and turned about to come home. A few yards off his path back, to the right and closer to the wood, lay the only man of all the bodies lying in the valley who seemed to have any life left in him. This fellow lay on his side, and was waving his hands feverishly when the minister went up to him, and—as we saw in a dim way through the snow—gave him a drink of the water from the lip of the stoup.
“Sassenach fool!” said young MacLachlan, parched with thirst, gathering in with a scooped hand the snow as it fell on the wall, and gluttonously sucking it.
“There are many kinds of folly, man,” said I; “and I would think twice before I would grudge a cleric’s right to give a mouthful of water to a dying man, even if he was a Mac Donald on his way to the Pit.”
“Tuts, tuts! Elrigmore,” cried John, “let the young cock crow; he means no more than that it’s hard to be hungry and see your brother feed a foeman. Indeed I could be wishing myself that his reverence was the Good Samaritan on a more fitting occasion.”
We were bandying words now, and not so closely watching our friend in the hollow, and it was Sir Donald, standing to a side a little, who called our attention anew, with a cry of alarm.
“Look, lads, look!” he cried, “God help Gordon!”
We looked through the snow—a grey veil—and saw two or three men fall on the minister.
John Splendid but stopped a second to say, “It may be a feint to draw us off the fort; bide where ye are,” and then he leaped over the wall, armed with a claymore picked from the haunch of a halberdier beside him. I was over at his heels, and the pair of us scoured down the brae.
There was some hazard in the enterprise; I’m ashamed to this day to tell I thought that, at every foot of the way as we ran on. Never before nor since have I felt a wood so sinister, so ghastly, so inspired by dreadful airs, and when it was full on our flank, I kept my head half turned to give an eye to where I was going and an eye to what might come out on my rear. People tell you fear takes wings at a stern climax, that a hot passion fills the brain with blood and the danger blurs to the eye. It’s a theory that works but poorly on a forlorn-hope, with a certainty that the enemy are outnumbering you on the rear. With man and ghost, I have always felt the same: give me my back to the wall, and I could pluck up valour enough for the occasion, but there’s a spot between the shoulders that would be coward flesh in Hector himself. That, I’m thinking, is what keeps some armies from turning tail to heavy odds.
Perhaps the terror behind (John swore anon he never thought on’t till he learned I had, and then he said he felt it worse than I) gave our approach all the more impetuousness, for we were down in the gut before the MacDonald loiterers (as they proved) were aware of our coming. We must have looked unco numerous and stalwart in the driving snow, for the scamps dashed off into the wood as might children caught in a mischief. We let them go, and bent over our friend, lying with a very gashly look by the body of the MacDonald, a man well up in years, now in the last throes, a bullet-wound in his neck and the blood frothing at his mouth.
“Art hurt, sir?” asked John, bending on a knee, but the minister gave no answer.
We turned him round and found no wound but a bruise on the head, that showed he had been attacked with a cudgel by some camp-followers of the enemy, who had neither swords, nor reverence for a priest who was giving a brotherly sup to one of their own tartan. In that driving snow we rubbed him into life again, cruelly pallid, but with no broken bit about him.
“Where’s my stoup?” were his first words; “my poor lads upbye must be wearying for water.” He looked pleased to see the same beside him where he had set it down, with its water untouched, and then he cast a wae glance on the dead man beside him.
“Poor wretch, poor wretch!” said he.
We took the stoup and our minister up to the summit, and had got him but safely set there when he let out what gave me the route again from Dunchuach, and led to divers circumstances that had otherwise never come into this story if story there was, which I doubt there had never been. Often I’ve thought me since how pregnant was that Christian act of Gordon in giving water to a foe. Had I gone, or had John gone, for the stoup of water, none of us, in all likelihood, had stirred a foot to relieve yon enemy’s drouth; but he found a godly man, though an austere one too on occasion, and paid for the cup of water with a hint in broken English that was worth all the gold in the world to me. Gordon told us the man’s dying confidence whenever he had come to himself a little more in the warmth of the fort fire.
“There’s a woman and child,” said he, “in the wood of Strongara.”
When the English minister, in his odd lalland Scots, had told us this tale of the dying MacDonald, I found for the first time my feeling to the daughter of the Provost of Inneraora, Before this the thought of her was but a pleasant engagement for the mind at leisure moments; now it flashed on my heart with a stound that yon black eyes were to me the dearest jewels in the world, that lacking her presence these glens and mountains were very cold and empty. I think I gave a gasp that let John Splendid into my secret there and then; but at least I left him no doubt about what I would be at.
“What’s the nearer way to Strongara?” I asked; “alongside the river, or through Tombreck?”
He but peered at me oddly a second under his brows—a trifle wistfully, though I might naturally think his mood would be quizzical, then he sobered in a moment That’s what I loved about the man; a fool would have laughed at the bravado of my notion, a man of thinner sentiment would have marred the moment by pointing out difficulties.
“So that’s the airt the wind’s in!” he said, and then he added, “I think I could show you, not the shortest, but the safest road.”
“I need no guidance,” I cried in a hurry, “only——”
“Only a friend who knows every wood in the country-side, and has your interest at heart, Colin,” he said, softly, putting a hand on my elbow and gripping it in a homely way. It was the first time he gave me my Christian name since I made his acquaintance.
His company was not to be denied.
We made up some bear-meal bannocks, and a collop of boiled venison in a knapsack that I carried on my back, borrowed plaids from some of the common soldiery, and set out for Strongara at the mouth of the night, with the snow still driving over the land.
MacLachlan was for with us, but John turned on him with a great deal of determination, and dared him to give extra risk to our enterprise by adding another man to the chance of the enemy seeing us.
The lad met the objection ungraciously, and John took to his flattery.
“The fact is, MacLachlan,” said he, taking him aside with a hand on his lapel, and a show of great confidence—“the fact is, we can’t be leaving this place in charge of a lot of old bodachs—Sir Donald the least able of them all,—and if there’s another attack the guidance of the defence will depend on you. You may relish that or you may not; perhaps after all you would be safer with us——”
MacLachlan put up his chest an inch or two, unconscious that he did it, and whistled a stave of music to give evidence of his indifférence. Then he knitted his brows to cogitate, as it were, and—
“Very well!” said he. “If you come on my coz, you’ll bring her back here, or to the castle, I suppose?”
“I had no thought of running away with the lass, I’ll take my oath,” cried John, sticking his tongue in the cheek nearest me.
“I wish I could fathom yon fellow’s mind,” I said to my comrade, as we stepped out through the snow and into the wooded brae-side, keeping a wary eye about for spies of the enemy, whose footprints we came on here and there, but so faint in the fresh snowfall that it was certain they were now in the valley.
“Do you find it difficult?” asked John. “I thought a man of schooling, with Latin at his tongue’s-end, would see to the deepest heart of MacLachlan.”
“He’s crafty.”
“So’s the polecat till the fox meets him. Tuts, man, you have a singular jealousy of the creature.”
“Since the first day I saw him.”
John laughed.
“That was in the Provost’s,” quo’ he, and he hummed a song I caught the meaning of but slightly.
“Wrong, wrong!” said I, striding under the trees as we slanted to the right for Tombreck. “His manner is provoking.”
“I’ve seen him polish it pretty well for the ladies.”
“His temper’s always on the boil.”
“Spirit, man; spirit! I like a fellow of warmth now and then.”
“He took it most ungraciously when we put him out of the Provost’s house on the night of the squabble in the town.”
“It was an awkward position he was in. I’d have been a bit black-browed about it myself,” said John. “Man! it’s easy to pick holes in the character of an unfriend, and you and MacLachlan are not friendly, for one thing that’s not his fault any more than yours.”
“You’re talking of the girl,” I said, sharply, and not much caring to show him how hot my face burned at having to mention her.
“That same,” said he; “I’ll warrant that if it wasn’t for the girl (the old tale! the old tale!), you had thought the young sprig not a bad gentleman after all.”
“Oh, damn his soul!” I blurted out “What is he that he should pester his betters with his attentions?”
“A cousin, I think, a simple cousin-german they tell me,” said John, drily; “and in a matter of betters, now—eh?”
My friend coughed on the edge of his plaid, and I could swear he was laughing at me. I said nothing for a while, and with my skin burning, led the way at a hunter’s pace. But John was not done with the subject.
“I’m a bit beyond the age of it myself,” he said; “but that’s no reason why I shouldn’t have eyes in my head. I know how much put about you are to have this young fellow gallivanting round the lady.”
“Jealous, you mean,” I cried.
“I didn’t think of putting it that way.”
“No; it’s too straightforward a way for you,—ever the roundabout way for you. I wish to God you would sometimes let your Campbell tongue come out of the kink, and say what you mean.”
With a most astonishing steady voice for a man as livid as the snow on the hair of his brogues, and with his hand on the hilt of his dirk, John cried—
“Stop a bit.”
I faced him in a most unrighteous humour, ready to quarrel with my shadow.
“For a man I’m doing a favour to, Elrigmore,” he said, “you seem to have a poor notion of politeness. I’m willing to make some allowance for a lover’s tirravee about a woman who never made tryst with him; but I’ll allow no man to call down the credit of my clan and name.”
A pair of gowks, were we not, in that darkening wood, quarrelling on an issue as flimsy as a spider’s web, but who will say it was not human nature? I daresay we might have come to hotter words and bloody blows there and then, but for one of the trifles that ever come in the way to change—not fate, for that’s changeless, but the semblance of it.
“My mother herself was a Campbell of an older family than yours,” I started to say, to show I had some knowledge of the breed, and at the same time a notion of fairness to the clan.
This was fresh heather on the fire.
“Older!” he cried; “she was a MacVicar as far as ever I heard; it was the name she took to kirk with her when she married your father.”
“So,” said I; “but——”
“And though I allow her grandfather Dpl-a-mhonadh [Donald-of-the-Hills] was a Campbell, it was in a roundabout way; he was but the son of one of the Craignish gentry.”
“You yourself——”
“Sir!” said he in a new tone, as cold as steel and as sharp, misjudging my intention.
“You yourself are no more than a M’Iver.”
“And what of that?” he cried, cooling down a bit “The M’ivers of Asknish are in the direct line from Duncan, Lord of Lochow. We had Pennymore, Stron-shira, and Glenaora as cadets of Clan Campbell when your Craignish cross-breeds were under the salt.”
“Only by the third cousin,” said I; “my father has told me over and over again that Duncan’s son had no heir.”
And so we went into all this perplexity of Highland pedigree like old wives at a waulking, forgetting utterly that what we began to quarrel about was the more serious charge of lying. M’lver was most frantic about the business, and I think I was cool, for I was never a person that cared a bodle about my history bye the second generation. They might be lairds or they might be lackeys for all the differ it made to me. Not that there were any lackeys among them. My grandfather was the grandson of Tormaid Mor, who held the whole east side of Lochow from Ford to Sonachan, and we have at home the four-posted bed that Tormaid slept on when the heads of the house of Argile were lying on white-hay or chaff.
At last John broke into a laugh.
“Aren’t you the amadan to be biting the tongue between your teeth?” he said.
“What is it?” I asked, constrained to laugh too.
“You talk about the crook in our Campbell tongue in one breath,” said he, “and in the next you would make yourself a Campbell more sib to the chief than I am myself. Don’t you think we might put off our little affairs of family history till we find a lady and a child in Stron-gara?”
“No more of it, then,” said I. “Our difference began on my fool’s notion that because I had something of what you would call a liking for this girl, no one else should let an eye light on her.”
By now we were in a wide glade in the Tombreck wood. On our left we could see lying among the grey snow the house of Tombreck, with no light nor lowe (as the saying goes); and though we knew better than to expect there might be living people in it, we sped down to see the place.
“There’s one chance in a million she might have ventured here,” I said.
A most melancholy dwelling! Dwelling indeed no more but for the hoodie-crow, and for the fawn of the hill that years after I saw treading over the grass-grown lintel of its door. To-night the place was full of empty airs and ghosts of sounds inexplicable, wailing among the cabars that jutted black and scarred mid-way from wall to wall The byre was in a huddle of damp thatch, and strewn (as God’s my judge) by the bones of the cattle the enemy had refused to drive before them in the sauciness of their glut A desolate garden slept about the place, with bush and tree—once tended by a family of girls, left orphan and desolate for evermore.
We went about on tiptoes as it might be in a house of the dead, and peeped in at the windows at where had been chambers lit by the cheerful cruisie or dancing with peat-fire flame—only the dark was there, horrible with the odours of char, or the black joist against the dun sky. And then we went to the front door (for Tombreck was a gentle-house), and found it still on the hinges, but hanging half back to give view to the gloomy interior. It was a spectacle to chill the heart, a house burned in hatred, the hearth of many songs and the chambers of love, merrymaking, death, and the children’s feet, robbed of every interest but its ghosts and the memories of them they came to.
“It were useless to look here; she is not here,” I said in a whisper to my comrade.
He stood with his bonnet in his hand, dumb for a space, then speaking with a choked utterance.
“Our homes, our homes, Colin!” he cried. “Have I not had the happy nights in those same walls, those harmless hospitable halls, those dead halls?”
And he looked broadcast over the country-side.
“The curse of Conan and the black stones on the hands that wrought this work!” he said. “Poison to their wells; may the brutes die far afield!”
The man was in a tumult of grief and passion, the tears, I knew by his voice, welling to his eyes. And indeed I was not happy myself, had not been happy indeed, by this black home, even if the girl I loved was waiting me at the turn of the road.
“Let us be going,” I said at last.
“She might be here; she might be in the little plantation!” he said (and still in the melancholy and quiet of the place we talked in whispers).
“Could you not give a call, a signal?” he asked; and I had mind of the call I had once taught her, the doleful pipe of the curlew.
I gave it with hesitancy to the listening night. It came back an echo from the hills, but brought no other answer.
A wild bird roosting somewhere in the ruined house flapped out by the door and over us. I am not a believer in the ghostly—at least to the extent of some of our people; yet I was alarmed, till my reason came to me and the badinage of the professors at college, who had twitted me on my fears of the mischancy. But M’Iver clutched me by the shoulder in a frenzy of terror. I could hear his teeth chittering as if he had come out of the sea.
“Name of God!” he cried, “what was yon?”
“But a night-hag,” said I.
He was ashamed of his weakness; but the night, as he said, had too many holes in it for his fancy.
And so we went on again across the hill-face in the sombre gloaming. It was odd that the last time I had walked on this hillside had been for a glimpse of that same girl we sought to-night. Years ago, when I was a lad, she had on a summer been sewing with a kinswoman in Car-lunnan, the mill croft beside a linn of the river, where the salmon plout in a most wonderful profusion, and I had gone at morning to the hill to watch her pass up and down in the garden of the mill, or feed the pigeons at the round doo-cot, content (or wellnigh content) to see her and fancy the wind in her tresses, the song at her lip. In these mornings the animals of the hill and the wood and I were friendly; they guessed somehow, perhaps, no harm was in my heart: the young roes came up unafraid, almost to my presence, and the birds fluttered like comrades about me, and the little animals that flourish in the wild dallied boldly in my path. It was a soft and tranquil atmosphere, it was a world (I think now) very happy and unperplexed. And at evening, after a hurried meal, I was off over the hills to this brae anew, to watch her who gave me an unrest of the spirit, unappeasable but precious. I think, though the mornings were sweet, ‘twas the eve that was sweeter still. All the valley would be lying soundless and sedate, the hills of Salachary and the forest of Creag Dubh purpling in the setting sun, a rich gold tipping Dunchuach like a thimble. Then the eastern woods filled with dark caverns of shade, wherein the tall trunks of the statelier firs stood grey as ghosts. What was it, in that precious time, gave me, in the very heart of my happiness, a foretaste of the melancholy of coming years? My heart would swell, the tune upon my lip would cease, my eyes would blur foolishly, looking on that prospect most magic and fine. Rarely, in that happy age, did I venture to come down and meet the girl, but—so contrary is the nature of man!—the day was happier when I worshipped afar, though I went home fuming at my own lack of spirit.
To-day, my grief! how different the tale! That bygone time loomed upon me like a wave borne down on a mariner on a frail raft, the passion of the past ground me inwardly in a numb pain.
We stumbled through the snow, and my comrade—good heart!—said never a word to mar my meditation. On our right the hill of Meall Ruadh rose up like a storm-cloud ere the blackest of the night fell; we walked on the edges of the plantations, surmising our way by the aid of the grey snow around us.
It was not till we were in the very heart of Strongara wood that I came to my reason and thought what folly was this to seek the wanderer in such a place in dead of night. To walk that ancient wood, on the coarse and broken ground, among fallen timber, bog, bush, water-pass, and hillock, would have tried a sturdy forester by broad day; it was, to us weary travellers, after a day of sturt, a madness to seek through it at night for a woman and child whose particular concealment we had no means of guessing.
M’lver, natheless, let me flounder through that perplexity for a time, fearful, I suppose, to hurt my feelings by showing me how little I knew of it, and finally he hinted at three cairns he was acquaint with, each elevated somewhat over the general run of the country, and if not the harbourage a refugee would make for, at least the most suitable coign to overlook the Strongara wood.
“Lead me anywhere, for God’s sake!” said I; “I’m as helpless as a mowdie on the sea-beach.”
He knew the wood as ‘twere his own garden, for he had hunted it many times with his cousiri, and so he led me briskly, by a kind of natural path, to the first cairn. Neither there nor at the second did I get answer to my whistle.
“We’ll go up on the third,” said John, “and bide there till morning; scouring a wood in this fashion is like hunting otters in the deep sea.”
We reached the third cairn when the hour was long past midnight I piped again in vain, and having ate part of our coilop, we set us down to wait the dawn. The air, for mid-winter, was almost congenial; the snow fell no longer; the north part of the sky was wondrous clear and even jubilant with star.