I woke with a shiver at the hour before dawn, that strange hour when the bird turns on the bough to change his dream, when the wild-cat puts out his tongue to taste the air and curls more warmly into his own fur, when the leaf of the willows gives a tremor in the most airless morning. M’Iver breathed heavily beside me, rolled in his plaid to the very nose, but the dumb cry of the day in travail called him, too, out of the chamber of sleep, and he turned on his back with a snatch of a soldier’s drill on his lips, but without opening his eyes.
We were on the edge of a glade of the wood, at the watershed of a small burn that tinkled among its ice along the ridge from Tombreck, dividing close beside us, half of it going to Shira Glen and half to Aora. The tall trees stood over us like sentinels, coated with snow in every bough; a cool crisp air fanned me, with a hint in it, somehow, of a smouldering wood-fire. And I heard close at hand the call of an owl, as like the whimper of a child as ever howlet’s vesper mocked. Then to my other side, my plaid closer about me, and to my dreaming anew.
It was the same whimper waked me a second time, too prolonged to be an owl’s complaint, and I sat upright to listen. It was now the break of day. A faint grey light brooded among the tree-tops.
“John! John!” I said in my companion’s ear, shaking his shoulder.
He stood to his feet in a blink, wide awake, fumbling at his sword-belt as a man at hurried wakings on foreign shores.
“What is it?” he asked, in a whisper.
I had no need to answer him, for anew the child’s cry rose in the wood—sharp, petulant, hungry. It came from a thick clump of undergrowth to the left of our night’s lodging, not sixty yards away, and in the half-light of the morning had something of the eerie about it.
John Splendid crossed himself ere he had mind of his present creed, and “God sain us!” he whispered; “have we here banshee or warlock!”
“I’ll warrant we have no more than what we seek,” said I, with a joyous heart, putting my tartan about me more orderly, and running a hand through my hair.
“I’ve heard of unco uncanny things assume a wean’s cry in a wood,” said he, very dubious in his aspect.
I laughed at him, and “Come away, ‘ille,” I said; “here’s the Provost’s daughter.” And I was hurrying in the direction of the cry.
M’Iver put a hand on my shoulder.
“Canny, man, canny; would ye enter a lady’s chamber (even the glade of the wood) without tirling at the pin?”
We stopped, and I softly sounded my curlew-call—once, twice, thrice.
The echo of the third time had not ceased on the hill when out stepped Betty. She looked miraculous tall and thin in the haze of the dawn, with the aspiring firs behind her, pallid at the face, wearied in her carriage, and torn at her kirtle by whin or thorn. The child clung at her coats, a ruddy brat, with astonishment stilling its whimper.
For a little the girl half misdoubted us, for the wood behind us and the still sombre west left us in a shadow, and there was a tremor in her voice as she challenged in English—
“Is that you, Elrigmore?”
I went forward at a bound, in a stupid rapture that made her shrink in alarm; but M’Iver lingered in the rear, with more discretion than my relations to the girl gave occasion for.
“Friends! oh, am not I glad to see yoa?” she said simply, her wan face lighting up. Then she sat down on a hillock and wept in her hands. I gave her awkward comfort, my wits for once failing me, my mind in a confusion, my hands, to my own sense, seeming large, coarse, and in the way. Yet to have a finger on her shoulder was a thrill to the heart, to venture a hand on her hair was a passionate indulgence.
The bairn joined in her tears till M’Iver took it in his arms. He had a way with little ones that had much of magic in it, and soon this one was nestling to his breast with its sobs sinking, an arm round his neck.
More at the pair of them than at me did Betty look with interest when her tears were concluded.
“Amn’t I like myself this morning?” asked John, jocularly, dandling the bairn in his arms.
Betty turned away without a reply, and when the child was put down and ran to her, she scarcely glanced on it, but took it by the hand and made to go before us, through the underwood she had come from.
“Here’s my home, gentlemen,” she said, “like the castle of Colin Dubh, with the highest ceiling in the world and the stars for candles.”
We might have passed it a score of times in broad daylight and never guessed its secret. It was the beildy side of the hill. Two fir-trees had fallen at some time in the common fashion of wind-blown pines, with their roots clean out of the earth, and raised up, so that coming together at two edges they made two sides of a triangle. To add to its efficiency as a hiding-place, some young firs grew at the open third side of the triangle.
In this confined little space (secure enough from any hurried search) there was still a greasach as we call it, the ember of a fire that the girl had kindled with a spark from a flint the night before, to warm the child, and she had kept it at the lowest extremity short of letting it die out altogether, lest it should reveal her whereabouts to any searchers in the wood.
We told her our story and she told us hers. She had fled on the morning of the attack, in the direction of the castle, but found her way cut off by a wing of the enemy, a number of whom chased her as she ran with the child up the river-side to the Cairnbaan, where she eluded her pursuers among his lordship’s shrubberies, and discovered a road to the wood. For a week she found shelter and food in a cow-herd’s abandoned bothy among the alders of Tarra-dubh; then hunger sent her travelling again, and she reached Leacainn Mhor, where she shared the cotter’s house with a widow woman who went out to the burn with a kail-pot and returned no more, for the tardy bullet found her. The murderers were ransacking the house when Betty and the child were escaping through the byre. This place of concealment in Strongara she sought by the advice of a Glencoe man well up in years, who came on her suddenly, and, touched by her predicament, told her he and his friends had so well beaten that place, it was likely to escape further search.
“And so I am here with my charge,” said the girl, affecting a gaiety it were hard for her to feel “I could be almost happy and content, if I were assured my father and mother were safe, and the rest of my kinsfolk.”
“There’s but one of them in all the countryside,” I said. “Young MacLachlan, and he’s on Dunchuach.”
To my critical scanning her cheek gave no flag.
“Oh, my cousin!” she said. “I am pleased that he is safe, though I would sooner hear he was in Cowal than in Campbell country.”
“He’s honoured in your interest, madam,” I could not refrain from saying, my attempt at raillery I fear a rather forlorn one.
She flushed at this, but said never a word, only biting her nether lip and fondling the child.
I think we put together a cautious little fire and cooked some oats from my dorlach, though the ecstasy of the meeting with the girl left me no great recollection of all that happened. But in a quiet part of the afternoon we sat snugly in our triangle of fir roots and discoursed of trifles that had no reasonable relation to our precarious state. Betty had almost an easy heart, the child slept on my comrade’s plaid, and I was content to be in her company and hear the little turns and accents of her voice, and watch the light come and go in her face, and the smile hover, a little wae, on her lips at some pleasant tale of Mover’s.
“How came you round about these parts?” she asked—for our brief account of our doings held no explanation of our presence in the wood of Strongara.
“Ask himself here,” said John, cocking a thumb over his shoulder at me; “I have the poorest of scents on the track of a woman.”
Betty turned to me with less interest in the question than she had shown when she addressed it first to my friend.
I told her what the Glencoe man had told the parson, and she sighed. “Poor man!” said she, “(blessing with him!) it was he that sent me here to Strongara, and gave me tinder and flint.”
“We could better have spared any of his friends, then,” said I. “But you would expect some of us to come in search of you?”
“I did,” she said in a hesitancy, and crimsoning in a way that tingled me to the heart with the thought that she meant no other than myself. She gave a caressing touch to the head of the sleeping child, and turned to M’Iver, who lay on his side with his head propped on an elbow, looking out on the hill-face.
“Do you know the bairn?” she asked.
“No,” he said, with a careless look where it lay as peaceful as in a cradle rocked by a mother’s foot.
“It’s the oe of Peggie Mhor,” she said.
“So,” said he; “poor dear!” and he turned and looked out again at the snow.
We were, in spite of our dead Glencoe man’s assurance, in as wicked a piece of country as well might be. No snow had fallen since we left Tombreck, and from that dolorous ruin almost to our present retreat was the patent track of our march.
“I’m here, and I’m making a fair show at an easy mind,” said M’I ver; “but I’ve been in cheerier circumstances ere now.”
“So have I, for that part of it,” said Betty with spirit, half humorously, half in an obvious punctilio.
“Mistress,” said he, sitting up gravely, “I beg your pardon. Do you wonder if I’m not in a mood for saying dainty things? Our state’s precarious (it’s needless to delude ourselves otherwise), and our friend Sandy and his bloody gang may be at a javelin’s throw from us as we sit here. I wish—”
He saw the girl’s face betray her natural alarm, and amended his words almost too quickly for the sake of the illusion.
“Tuts, tuts!” he cried. “I forgot the wood was searched before, and here I’m putting a dismal black face on a drab business. We might be a thousand times worse. I might be a clay-cold corp with my last week’s wage unspent in my sporran, as it happens to be, and here I’m to the fore with four or five MacDonalds to my credit If I’ve lost my mercantile office as mine-manager (curse your trades and callings!) my sword is left me; you have equal fortune, Elrigmore; and you, Mistress Brown, have them you love spared to you.”
Again the girl blushed most fiercely. “Thank God! Thank God!” she cried in a stifled ecstasy, “and O! but I’m grateful.” And anew she fondled the little bye-blow as it lay with its sunny hair on the soldier’s plaid.
John glanced at her from the corners of his eyes with a new expression, and asked her if she was fond of bairns.
“Need you ask that of a woman?” she said. “But for the company of this one on my wanderings, my heart had failed me a hundred times a-day. It was seeing him so helpless that gave me my courage: the dark at night in the bothy and the cot and the moaning wind of this lone spot had sent me crazy if I had not this little one’s hand in mine, and his breath in my hair as we lay together.”
“To me,” said John, “they’re like flowers, and that’s the long and the short of it.”
“You’re like most men, I suppose,” said Betty, archly; “fond of them in the abstract, and with small patience for the individuals of them. This one now—you would not take half the trouble with him I found a delight in. But the nursing of bairns—even their own—is not a soldier’s business.”
“No, perhaps not,” said M’Iver, surveying her gravely; “and yet I’ve seen a soldier, a rough hired cavalier, take a wonderful degree of trouble about a duddy little bairn of the enemy in the enemy’s country. He was struck—as he told me after—by the look of it sitting in a scene of carnage, orphaned without the sense of it, and he carried it before him on the saddle for a many leagues’ march till he found a peaceful wayside cottage, where he gave it in the charge of as honest a woman, to all appearance, as these parts could boast He might even—for all I know to the contrary—have fairly bought her attention for it by a season’s paying of the kreutzers, and I know it cost him a duel with a fool who mocked the sentiment of the deed.”
“I hope so brave and good a man was none the worse for his duel in a cause so noble,” said the girl, softly.
“Neither greatly brave nor middling good,” said John, laughing, “at least to my way of thinking, and I know him well. But he was no poorer but by the kreutzers for his advocacy of an orphan bairn.”
“I think I know the man,” said I, innocently, “and his name would be John.”
“And John or George,” said the girl, “I could love him for his story.”
M’Iver lifted a tress of the sleeping child’s hair and toyed with it between his fingers.
“My dear, my dear!” said he; “it’s a foolish thing to judge a man’s character by a trifle like yon: he’s a poor creature who has not his fine impulse now and then; and the man I speak of, as like as not, was dirling a wanton flagon (or maybe waur) ere nightfall, or slaying with cruelty and zest the bairn’s uncles in the next walled town he came to. At another mood he would perhaps balance this lock of hair against a company of burghers but fighting for their own fire-end.”
“The hair is not unlike your own,” said Betty, comparing with quick eyes the curl he held and the curls that escaped from under the edge of his flat blue bonnet.
“May every hair of his be a candle to light him safely through a mirk and dangerous world,” said he, and he began to whittle assiduously at a stick, with a little black oxter-knife he lugged from his coat.
“Amen!” said the girl, bravely; “but he were better with the guidance of a good father, and that there seems small likelihood of his enjoying—poor thing!”
A constraint fell on us; it may have been there before, but only now I felt it myself. I changed the conversation, thinking that perhaps the child’s case was too delicate a subject, but unhappily made the plundering of our glens my dolorous text, and gloom fell like a mort-cloth on our little company. If my friend was easily uplifted, made buoyantly cheerful by the least accident of life, he was as prone to a hellish melancholy when fate lay low. For the rest of the afternoon he was ever staving with a gloomy brow about the neighbourhood, keeping an eye, as he said, to the possible chance of the enemy.
Left thus for long spaces in the company of Betty and the child, that daffed and croodled about her, and even became warmly friendly with me for the sake of my Paris watch and my glittering waistcoat buttons, I made many gallant attempts to get on my old easy footing. That was the wonder of it: when my interest in her was at the lukewarm, I could face her repartee with as good as she gave; now that I loved her (to say the word and be done with it), my words must be picked and chosen and my tongue must stammer in a contemptible awkwardness. Nor was she, apparently, quite at her ease, for when our talk came at any point too close on her own person, she was at great pains adroitly to change it to other directions.
I never, in all my life, saw a child so muckle made use of. It seemed, by the most wonderful of chances, to be ever needing soothing or scolding or kissing or running after in the snow, when I had a word to say upon the human affections, or a compliment to pay upon some grace of its most assiduous nurse.
“I’m afraid,” said Betty at last, “you learned some courtiers’ flatteries and coquetries in your travels. You should have taken the lesson like your friend and fellow-cavalier M’Iver, and got the trick of keeping a calm heart.”
“M’Iver!” I cried. “He’s an old hand at the business.”
She put her lips to the child’s neck and kissed it tumultuously.
“Not—not at the trade of lovier?” she asked after a while, carelessly keeping up the crack.
“Oh no!” I said, laughing. “He’s a most religious man.”
“I would hardly say so much,” she answered, coldly; “for there have been tales—some idle, some otherwise—about him, but I think his friend should be last to hint at any scandal.”
Good heavens! here was a surprise for one who had no more notion of traducing his friend than of miscalling the Shorter Catechism. The charge stuck in my gizzard. I fumed and sweat, speechless at the injustice of it, while the girl held herself more aloof than ever, busy preparing for our evening meal.
But I had no time to put myself right in her estimate of me before M’Iver came back from his airing with an alarming story.
“It’s time we were taking our feet from here,” he cried, running up to us. “I’ve been up on Meall Ruadh there, and I see the whole countryside’s in a confusion. Pipers are blowing away down the glen and guns are firing; if it’s not a muster of the enemy preparatory to their quitting the country, it’s a call to a more particular search in the hills and woods. Anyway we must be bundling.”
He hurriedly stamped out the fire, that smoked a faint blue reek which might have advertised our whereabouts, and Betty clutched the child to her arms, her face again taking the hue of hunt and fear she wore when we first set eyes on her in the morning.
“Where is safety?” she asked, hopelessly. “Is there a sheep-fank or a sheiling-bothy in Argile that is not at the mercy of those blood-hounds?”
“If it wasn’t for the snow on the ground,” said M’Iver, “I could find a score of safe enough hidings between here and the Beannan.” “Heavens!” he added, “when I think on it, the Beannan itself is the place for us; it’s the one safe spot we can reach by going through the woods without leaving any trace, if we keep under the trees and in the bed of the burn.”
We took the bairn in turns, M’Iver and I, and the four of us set out for the opposite side of Glenaora for the eas or gully called the Beannan, that lay out of any route likely to be followed by the enemy, whether their object was a retreat or a hunting. But we were never to reach this place of refuge, as it happened; for M’Iver, leading down the burn by a yard or two, had put his foot on the path running through the pass beside the three bridges, when he pulled back, blanching more in chagrin than apprehension.
“Here they are,” he said “We’re too late; there’s a band of them on the march up this way.”
At our back was the burned ruin of a house that had belonged to a shepherd who was the first to flee to the town when the invaders came. Its byre was almost intact, and we ran to it up the burn as fast as we could, and concealed ourselves in the dark interior. Birds came chirping under the eaves of thatch and by the vent-holes, and made so much bickering to find us in their sanctuary that we feared the bye-passers, who were within a whisper of our hiding, would be surely attracted Band after band of the enemy passed, laden in the most extraordinary degree with the spoil of war. They had only a rough sort of discipline in their retirement: the captains or chieftains marched together, leaving the companies to straggle as they might, for was not the country deserted by every living body but themselves? In van of them they drove several hundreds of black and red cattle, and with the aid of some rough ponies, that pulled such sledges (called carns) as are used for the hauling home of peat on hilly land, they were conveying huge quantities of household plenishing and the merchandise of the burgh town.
Now we had more opportunity of seeing those coarse savage forces than on any occasion since they came to Argile, for the whole of them had mustered at Inneraora after scouring the shire, and were on their march out of the country to the north, fatter men and better put-on than when they came. Among them were numerous tartans, either as kilt, trews, or plaid; the bonnet was universal, except that some of the officers wore steel helms, with a feather tip in them, and a clan badge of heather or whin or moss, and the dry oak-stalk whimsy of Montrose. They had come bare-footed and bare-buttocked (many of the privates of them) to Campbell country; now, as I say, they were very snod, the scurviest of the knaves set up with his hosen and brogues. Sturdy and black, or lank and white-haired like the old sea-rovers, were they, with few among them that ever felt the razor edge, so that the hair coated them to the very eyeholes, and they looked like wolves. The pipers, of whom there were three, were blasting lustily at Clanranald’s march when they came up the lower part of the Glen, according to M’Iver, who had heard them from Meall Ruadh; but now the music was stopped, and all were intent upon driving the cattle or watching their stolen gear’, for doubtless among such thieves there was not as much honour as would prevent one from picking his neighbour’s sporran.
We lay buried to the head in bracken that filled one side of the byre, and keeked through the plenteous holes in the dry-stone wall at the passing army. Long gaps were between the several clans, and the Irish came last It seemed—they moved so slowly on account of the cattle—that the end of the cavalcade was never to come; but at length came the baggage and the staff of Montrose himself. Then I got my first look of the man whose name stinks in the boar’s snout to this day. A fellow about thirty-three years of age, of mid height, hair of a very dark red, hanging in a thick fell on the shoulders of the tartan jacket (for he wore no armour), with a keen scrutinising eye, and his beard trimmed in the foreign vein. He sat his horse with considerable ease and grace, and was surrounded by half-a-dozen of the chiefs who had come under his banner. The most notable-looking of these was Alasdair MacDonald, the Major-General, an uncouth dog, but a better general, as I learned later, than ever God or practice made James Grahame of Montrose; with John of Moidart, the Captain of Clanranald, Donald Glas MacRanald of Keppoch, the laird of Glencoe, Stewart of Appin, and one of the Knoydart house, all of whilk we distinguished by their tartans and badges.
In the mien of these savage chiefs there was great elation that Montrose had little share in, to all appearance. He rode moodily, and when fair opposite our place of concealment he stopped his horse as if to quit the sell, but more likely to get, for a little, out of the immediate company of his lawless troops. None of those home-returning Gaels paid heed to his pause, for they were more Alasdair Macdonald’s men than his; Mac-Donald brought them to the lair of the boar, MacDonald glutted their Highland thirst for Campbell blood, Mac-Donald had compelled this raid in spite of the protests of the nobleman who held the King’s Commission and seal.
For some minutes his lordship stood alone on the pathway. The house where we lay was but one, and the meanest, among a numerous cluster of such drear memorials of a black business, and it was easy to believe this generalissimo had some gloomy thoughts as he gazed on the work he had lent consent to. He looked at the ruins and he looked up the pass at his barbarians, and shrugged his shoulders with a contempt there was no mistaking.
“I could bring him down like a capercailzie,” said M’Iver, coolly, running his eye along his pistol and cocking it through his keek-hole.
“For God’s sake don’t shoot!” I said, and he laughed quietly.
“Is there anything in my general deportment, Colin, that makes ye think me an assassin or an idiot? I never wantonly shot an unsuspecting enemy, and I’m little likely to shoot Montrose and have a woman and bairn suffer the worst for a stupid moment of glory.”
As ill luck would have it, the bairn, that had been playing peacefully in the dusk, at this critical minute let up a cry Montrose plainly heard.
“We’re lost, we’re lost,” said Betty, trembling till the crisp dry bracken rustled about her, and she was for instant flight.
“If we’re lost, there’s a marquis will go travelling with us,” said M’Iver, covering his lordship’s heart with his pistol.
Had Montrose given the slightest sign that he intended to call back his men to tread out this last flicker of life in Aora Glen he would never have died on the gibbet at the Grassmarket of Dunedin, Years after, when Grahame met his doom (with much more courtliness and dignity than I could have given him credit for), M’Iver would speak of his narrow escape at the end of the raiding.
“I had his life in the crook of my finger,” he would say; “had I acted on my first thought, Clan Campbell would never have lost Inverlochy; but bha e air an dàn,—what will be will be,—and Grahame’s fate was not in the crook of my finger, though so I might think it Aren’t we the fools to fancy sometimes our human wills decide the course of fate, and the conclusions of circumstances? From the beginning of time, my Lord Marquis of Montrose was meant for the scaffold.”
Montrose, when he heard the child’s cry, only looked to either hand to see that none of his friends heard it, and finding there was no one near him, took off his Highland bonnet, lightly, to the house where he jaloused there was a woman with the wean, and passed slowly on his way.
“It’s so honest an act,” said John, pulling in his pistol, “that I would be a knave to advantage myself of the occasion.”
A generous act enough. I daresay there were few in the following of James Grahame would have borne such a humane part at the end of a bloody business, and I never heard our people cry down the name of Montrose (bitter foe to me and mine) but I minded to his credit that he had a compassionate ear for a child’s cry in the ruined hut of Aora Glen.
Montrose gave no hint to his staff of what he had heard, for when he joined them, he nor they turned round to look behind. Before us now, free and open, lay the way to Inneraora. We got down before the dusk fell, and were the first of its returning inhabitants to behold what a scandal of charred houses and robbed chests the Athole and Antrim caterans had left us.
In the grey light the place lay tenantless and melancholy, the snow of the silent street and lane trodden to a slush, the evening star peeping between the black roof-timbers, the windows lozenless, the doors burned out or hanging off their hinges. Before the better houses were piles of goods and gear turned out on the causeway. They had been turned about by pike-handles and trodden upon with contemptuous heels, and the pick of the plenishing was gone. Though upon the rear of the kirk there were two great mounds, that showed us where friend and foe had been burled, that solemn memorial was not so poignant to the heart at the poor relics of the homes gutted and sacked. The Provost’s tenement, of all the lesser houses in the burgh, was the only one that stood in its outer entirety, its arched ceils proof against the malevolent fire. Yet its windows gaped black and empty. The tide was in close on the breast-wall behind, and the sound of it came up and moaned in the close like the sough of a sea-shell held against the ear.
We stood in the close, the three of us (the bairn clinging in wonder to the girl’s gown), with never a word for a space, and that sough of the sea was almost a coronach.
In a few hours, as it were, the news that the enemy had left the country was put about the shire, and people returned to pick up the loose ends of the threads of family and affairs. Next day my lord the Marquis came round Lochlong and Glencroe in a huge chariot with four wheels, the first we had ever seen in these parts, a manner of travel incumbent upon him because of a raxed shoulder he had met with at Dunbarton. He came back to a poor reception: the vestiges of his country’s most bitter extremity were on every hand, and, what was bound to be embarrassing to any nobleman of spirit, there was that in the looks and comportment of his clansmen that must have given MacCailein some unpleasant thought.
Behind his lordship came eleven hundred Lowland levies that had been with Baillie in England, and to command them came his cousin, Sir Duncan Campbell of Auchinbreac, luckily new over from Ireland, and in the spirit for campaigning. A fiery cross was sent round the clan, that in better times should easily have mustered five thousand of the prettiest lads ever trod heather, but it brought only a remnant of a thousand, and the very best that would have been welcome under the galley flag were too far afield for the summons to reach them in time. But every well-affected branch of Clan Campbell sent its gentlemen to officer our brigade.
A parley of war held in the castle determined on immediate pursuit of Montrose to Lochaber, keeping within easy distance, but without attacking till he was checked in front by troops that had gone up to flank him by way of Stirling. I was at the council, but had little to do with its decision, though the word of M’Iver and myself (as was due to cavaliers of experience) was invited with respect.
We were to march in two days; and as I had neither house nor ha’ to shelter me, seeing the old place up the glen was even more of a ruin than in Donald Gorm’s troubles, when the very roof-tree was thrown in Dhuloch, I shared quarters with M’Iver in the castle, where every available corner was occupied by his lordship’s guests.
When these other guests were bedded, and the house in all our wing of it was still, my comrade and I sat down to a tasse of brandy in our chamber, almost blythe, as you would say, at the prospect of coming to blows with our country’s spoilers. We were in the midst of a most genial crack when came a faint rap at the door, and in steps the goodman, as solemn as a thunder-cloud, in spite of the wan smile he fixed upon his countenance. He bore his arm out of his sleeve in a sling, and his hair was un-trim, and for once a most fastidious nobleman was anything but perjink.
“I cry pardon, gentlemen!” he said in Gaelic, “for breaking in on my guests’ privacy; but I’m in no humour for sleeping, and I thought you might have a spare glass for a friend.”
“It’s your welcome, Argile,” said I, putting a wand chair to the front for him. He sat himself down in it with a sigh of utter weariness, and nervously poking the logs on the fire with a purring-iron, looked sadly about the chamber.
It was his wife’s tiring-room, or closet, or something of that nature, fitted up hastily for our accommodation, and there were signs of a woman’s dainty hand and occupation about it The floor was carpeted, the wall was hung with arras; a varnish ‘scrutoire, some sweet-wood boxes, two little statues of marble, two raised silver candlesticks with snuffers conform, broidery-work unfinished, and my lord’s picture, in a little gilded frame hanging over a dressing-table, were among its womanly plenishing.
“Well, coz,” said his lordship, breaking an awkward silence, “we have an enormous and dastardly deed here to avenge.”
“We have that!” said M’Iver. “It’s a consolation that we are in the mood and in the position to set about paying the debt. Before the glad news came of your return, I was half afraid that our quarry would be too far gone ere we set loose the dogs on him. Luckily he can be little farther than Glenurchy now. Elrigmore and I had the honour to see the visitors make their departure. They carried so much stolen gear, and drove so big a prize of cattle, that I would not give them more than a twenty miles’ march to the day.”
“Will they hang together, do you think?” asked his lordship, fingering a crystal bottle for essence that lay on the ‘scrutoire.
“I misdoubt it,” said M’Iver. “You know the stuff, MacCailein? He may have his Irish still; but I’ll wager the MacDonalds, the Stewarts, and all the rest of that reiving crowd are off to their holds, like the banditty they are, with their booty. A company of pikes on the rear of him, as like as not, would settle his business.”
The Marquis, besides his dishevelment, was looking very lean and pale. I am wrong if I had not before me a man who had not slept a sound night’s sleep in his naked bed since the point of war beat under his castle window.
“Your arm, my lord “—I said in a pause of his conversation with Mlver, “is it a fashious injury? You look off your ordinary.”
“I do,” he said. “I daresay I do, and I wish to God it was only this raxed arm that was the worst of my ailment.”
His face burned up red in the candle-light, his nostrils swelled, and he rose in his chair. A small table was between us. He put his uninjured hand on it to steady himself, and leaned over to me to make his words more weighty for my ear.
“Do you know,” he added, “I’m Archibald, Marquis of Argile, and under the cope and canopy of heaven this January night there’s not a creature of God’s making more down in the heart and degraded than I? If the humblest servant in my house pointed a scornful finger at me and cried ‘Coward,’ I would bow my head. Ay, ay! it’s good of you, sir, to shake a dissenting head; but I’m a chief discredited. I know it, man. I see it in the faces about me. I saw it at Rosneath, when my very gardener fumbled, and refused to touch his bonnet when I left. I saw it to-night at my own table, when the company talked of what they should do, and what my men should do, and said never a word of what was to be expected of MacCailein Mor.”
“I think, my lord,” I cried “that you’re exaggerating a very small affair.”
“Small affair!” he said (and he wetted his lips with his tongue before the words came). “Small affair! Hell’s flame! is there anything smaller than the self-esteem of a man who by some infernal quirk of his nature turns his back on his most manifest duty—leaves the blood of his blood and the skin of his skin to perish for want of his guidance and encouragement, and wakens at morning to find it no black nightmare but the horrible fact? Answer me that, Elrigmore!”
“Tut, tut,” said M’Iver, pouring his cousin a glass; “you’re in the vapours, and need a good night’s sleep. There’s no one in Argile dare question your spirit, whatever they may think of your policy.”
Argile relapsed into his chair, and looked with a pitiful eye at his kinsman.
“My good Iain,” he said, “do you ken the old Lochow wife’s story of the two daws? ‘Thou didst well,’ said the one, ‘though thy wings are cut; thou didst well to do as I told thee.’ I’m not blaming you; you are a brave man of your own hands, and a middling honest man too, as honesty goes among mercenaries; but your tongue’s plausible, plausible, and you are the devil’s counsellor to any other man who slackens his will by so much as a finger-length.”
M’Iver took on a set stern jaw, and looked his chief very dourly in the face.
“My Lord of Argile,” he said, “you’re my cousin-ger-man, and you’re in a despondent key, and small blame to you with your lands smoking about you from Cruachan to Kilmartin; but if you were King Tearlach himself, I would take no insult from you. Do you charge me with any of your misfortunes?”
“I charge you with nothing, John,” said Argile, wearily. “I’m only saying that at a time of stress, when there’s a conflict in a man’s mind between ease and exertion, you’re not the best of consciences. Are we two going to quarrel about a phrase while our clansmen’s blood is crying from the sod? Sit down, sir; sit down, if it please you,” he said more sternly, the scowl that gave him the gruamach reputation coming on his face; “sit down, if it please you, and instead of ruffling up like the bubbly-jock over words, tell me, if you can, how to save a reputation from the gutter. If it was not that I know I have your love, do you think I should be laying my heart bare here and now? You have known me some time now, M’Iver—did you ever find me without some reserve in my most intimate speech? Did you ever hear me say two words that I had not a third in the background to bring forward if the policy of the moment called for it?”
M’Iver laughed slyly, and hesitated to make any answer.
“It’s a simple question,” said the Marquis; “am I to think it needs too straightforward an answer for John Splendid to give it?”
“I’m as frank as my neighbours,” said M’Iver.
“Well, sir, do not check the current of my candour by any picking and choosing of words. I ask if you have ever found me with the babbling and unbridled tongue of a fool in my mouth, giving my bottom-most thought to the wind and the street?”
“You were no Gael if you did, my lord. That’s the sin of the shallow wit. I aye kept a bit thought of my own in the corner of my vest.”
MacCailein sighed, and the stem of the beaker he was fingering broke in his nervous fingers. He threw the fragments with an impatient cry into the fireplace.
“It’s the only weakness of our religion (God pardon the sin of hinting at any want in that same!) that we have no chance of laying the heart bare to mortal man. Many a time I could wish for the salving influence of the confessional, even without the absolution to follow.”
“I think,” said John Splendid, “it would be a strange day when MacCailein Mor, Marquis of Argile, would ask or need shriving from anything or any one. There was never a priest or vicar in the shire you couldn’t twist the head off!”
The Marquis turned to me with a vexed toss of his shoulder. “It’s a hopeless task to look for a pagan’s backbone,” said he. “Come, I’ll confess. I dare not hint at my truant thought to Auchinbreac or before any of these fiery officers of mine, who fear perhaps more than they love me. At the black tale of my weakness they would make no allowance for my courage as the same was shown before.”
“Your courage, sir,” said I, “has been proved; it is the inheritance of your race. But I dare not strain my conscience, my lord, much as I love and honour your house, to say I could comprehend or concur in the extraordinary retirement you made from these parts when our need for your presence was the sorest.”
“I thank you for that, Elrigmore,” said his lordship, cordially. “You say no more now than you showed by your face (and perhaps said too) on the night the beacon flamed on Dunchuach. To show that I value your frankness—that my kinsman here seems to fancy a flaw ol character—I’ll be explicit on the cause of my curious behaviour in this crisis. When I was a boy I was brought up loyally to our savage Highland tradition, that feuds were to carry on, and enemies to confound, and that no logic under heaven should keep the claymore in its sheath while an old grudge was to wipe out in blood or a wrong to right.”
“A most sensible and laudable doctrine!” cried M’Iver. “With that and no more of a principle in life—except paying your way among friends—a good man of his hands could make a very snug and reputable progress through the world.”
“Some men might,” said Argile, calmly; “I do not know whether to envy or pity their kind. But they are not my kind. I think I bore myself not ungracefully in the Cabinet, in the field too, so long as I took my father’s logic without question. But I have read, I have pondered——”
“Just so,” whispered M’Iver, not a bit abashed that a sneer was in his interjection and his master could behold it.
“—And I have my doubts about the righteousness of much of our warfare, either before my day or now. I have brought the matter to my closet I have prayed——”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed M’Iver, but at once he asked pardon.
“—I am a man come—or wellnigh come—to the conclusion that his life was never designed by the Creator to be spent in the turmoil of faction and field. There is, I allow, a kind of man whom strife sets off, a middling good man in his way, perhaps, with a call to the sword whose justice he has never questioned. I have studied the philosophies; I have reflected on life—this unfathomable problem—and ‘fore God I begin to doubt my very right to wear a breastplate against the poignard of fate. Dubiety plays on me like a flute.”
To all this I listened soberly, at the time comprehending that this was a gentleman suffering from the disease of being unable to make up his mind. I would have let him go on in that key while he pleasured it, for it’s a vein there’s no remedy for at the time being; but M’Iver was not of such tolerant stuff as I. He sat with an amazed face till his passion simmered over into a torrent of words.
“MacCailein!” said he, “I’ll never call you coward, but I’ll call you mad, book mad, closet mad! Was this strong fabric your house of Argile (John M’Iver the humblest of its members) built up on doubt and whim and shillyshally hither and yond? Was’t that made notable the name of your ancestor Cailein Mor na Sringe, now in the clods of Kilchrenan, or Cailein Iongataich who cooled his iron hide in Linne-na-luraich; or your father himself (peace with him!), who did so gallantly at Glenlivet?”
“——And taught me a little of the trade of slaughter at the Western Isles thirty years ago come Candlemas,” said the Marquis. “How a man ages! Then—then I had a heart like the bird of spring.”
“He could have taught you worse! I’m your cousin, and I’ll say it to your beard, sir! Your glens and howes are ruined, your cattle are houghed and herried, your clan’s name is a bye-word this wae day in all Albainn, and you sit there like a chemist weighing the wind on your stomach.”
“You see no farther than your nose, John,” said the Marquis, petulantly, the candle-light turning his eyes blood-red.
“Thank God for that same!” said Mlver, “if it gives me the wit to keep an enemy from striking the same. If the nose was Argile’s, it might be twisted off his face while he debated upon his right to guard it.”
“You’re in some ways a lucky man,” said the Marquis, still in the most sad and tolerant humour. “Did you never have a second’s doubt about the right of your side in battle?”
“Here’s to the doubt, sir!” said M’Iver. “I’m like yourself and every other man in a quandary of that kind, that thinking on it rarely brought me a better answer to the guess than I got from my instinct to start with.”
Argile put his fingers through his hair, clearing the temples, and shutting wearied eyes on a perplexing world.
“I have a good deal of sympathy with John’s philosophy,” I said, modestly. “I hold with my father that the sword is as much God’s scheme as the cassock. What are we in this expedition about to start but the instruments of Heaven’s vengeance on murtherers and unbelievers?”
“I could scarcely put it more to the point myself,” cried M’Iver. “A soldier’s singular and essential duty is to do the task set him with such art and accomplishment as he can—in approach, siege, trench, or stronghold.”
“Ay, ay! here we are into our dialectics again,” said his lordship, laughing, with no particular surrender in his merriment. “You gentlemen make no allowance for the likelihood that James Grahame, too, may be swearing himself Heaven’s chosen weapon. ‘Who gave Jacob to the spoil and Israel to the robbers—did not I, the Lord?’ Oh, it’s a confusing world!”
“Even so, MacCailein; I’m a plain man,” said M’Iver, “though of a good family, brought up roughly among men, with more regard to my strength and skill of arm than to book-learning; but I think I can say that here and in this crisis I am a man more fit, express, and appropriate than yourself. In the common passions of life, in hate, in love, it is the simple and confident act that quicker achieves its purpose than the cunning ingenuity. A man in a swither is a man half absent, as poor a fighter as he is indifferent a lover; the enemy and the girl will escape him ere he has throttled the doubt at his heart There’s one test to my mind for all the enterprises of man—are they well contrived and carried to a good conclusion? There may be some unco quirks to be performed, and some sore hearts to confer at the doing of them, but Heaven itself, for all its puissance, must shorten the pigeon’s wing that the gled of the wood may have food to live on.”
“Upon my word, M’Iver,” said Argile, “you beat me at my own trade of debate, and—have you ever heard of a fellow Machiavelli?”
“I kent a man of that name in a corps we forgathered with at Mentz—a ‘provient schriever,’ as they called him. A rogue, with a hand in the sporran of every soldier he helped pay wage to.”
“This was a different person; but no matter. Let us back to the beginning of our argument—why did you favour my leaving for Dunbarton when Montrose came down the Glen?”
The blood swept to M’Iver’s face, and his eye quailed.
“I favoured no such impolitic act,” said he, slowly. “I saw you were bent on going, and I but backed you up, to leave you some rags of illusion to cover your naked sin.”
“I thought no less,” said Argile, sadly, “and yet, do you know, Iain, you did me a bad turn yonder. You made mention of my family’s safety, and it was the last straw that broke the back of my resolution. One word of honest duty from you at that time had kept me in Inner-aora though Abijah’s array and Jeroboam’s horse and foot were coming down the glens.”
For a little M’Iver gave no answer, but sat in a chair of torture.
“I am sorry for it,” he said at last, in a voice that was scarce his own; “I’m in an agony for it now; and your horse was not round Strone before I could have bit out the tongue that flattered your folly.”
MacCailein smiled with a solemn pity that sat oddly on the sinister face that was a mask to a complex and pliable soul.
“I have no doubt,” said he, “and that’s why I said you were a devil’s counsellor. Man, cousin! have we not played together as boys on the shore, and looked at each other on many a night across a candid bowl? I know you like the open book; you and your kind are the weak, strong men of our Highland race. The soft tongue and the dour heart; the good man at most things but at your word!”