He was a lantern-jawed, sallow-faced, high-browed fellow in his prime, with the merest hint of a hirple or halt in his walk, very shabby in his dress, wearing no sporran, but with a dagger bobbing about at his groin. I have never seen a man with surprise more sharply stamped on his visage than was betrayed by this one when he got close upon us and found two of a clan so unlikely to have stray members out for a careless airing on a forenoon in Badenoch.
“You’re taking your walk?” he said, with a bantering tone, after a moment’s pause.
“You couldn’t have guessed better,” said John. “We are taking all we’re likely to get in so barren a country.”
The stranger chuckled sourly as the three of us stood in a group surveying each other. “My name,” said he, in his odd north Gaelic, and throwing out his narrow chest, “is John MacDonad I’m Keppoch’s bard, and I’ve no doubt you have heard many of my songs. I’m namely in the world for the best songs wit ever strung together. Are you for war? I can stir you with a stave to set your sinews straining. Are you for the music of the wood? The thrush itself would be jealous of my note. Are you for the ditty of the lover? Here’s the songster to break hearts. Since the start of time there have been ‘prentices at my trade: I have challenged North and East, South and the isle-flecked sea, and they cry me back their master.”
M’Iver put a toe on one of mine, and said he, “Amn’t I the unlucky man, for I never heard of you?”
“Tut, tut,” cried the bard in a fret, “perhaps you think so much in Argile of your hedge-chanters that you give the lark of the air no ear.”
“We have so many poets between Knapdale and Cruachan,” said John, “that the business is fallen out of repute, and men brag when they can make an honest living at prose.”
“Honest living,” said the bard, “would be the last thing I would expect Clan Campbell to brag of.”
He was still in an annoyance at the set-back to his vanity, shuffling his feet restlessly on the ground, and ill at ease about the mouth, that I’ve noticed is the first feature to show a wound to the conceit.
“Come, come,” he went on, “will you dare tell me that the sheiling singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my ‘Harp of the Trees’? If there’s a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I’ve yet to learn it.”
“If I heard it,” said John, “I’ve forgotten it.”
“Name of God!” cried the bard in amaze, “you couldn’t; it goes so”—and he hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had been singing some years before.
We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain of it, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of his budget—some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knew by fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh—but to each and all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance.
“No doubt,” said he, “they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, but Argile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for a living but string rhymes?”
The bard was in a sweat of vexation. “I’ve wandered far,” said he, “and you beat all I met in a multitude of people. Do you think the stringing of rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the field and the wood between his duans?”
“I think,” said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestness was in his utterance)—“I think his songs would be all the better for some such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt the blood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at the pit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of a desolate home? Love,—sir, you are young, young———”
“Thanks be with you,” said the bard; “your last word gives me the clue to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made in my country could confer.”
I’m afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.
“John Lorn, John Lom!” I cried, “I heard a soldier sing your songs in the ship Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore.”
He turned with a grateful eye from M’Iver to me, and I felt that I had one friend now in Badenoch.
“Do you tell me?” he asked, a very child in his pleasure, that John Splendid told me after he had not the heart to mar. “Which one did they sing—‘The Harp of the Trees’ or ‘Macrannul Og’s Lament’? I am sure it would be the Lament: it is touched with the sorrow of the starless night on a rain-drummed, wailing sea. Or perhaps they knew—the gentle hearts—my ‘Farewell to the Fisher.’ I made it with yon tremor of joy, and it is telling of the far isles beyond Uist and Barra, and the Seven Hunters, and the white sands of Colomkill.”
M’Iver sat down on the wayside and whittled a stick with a pretence at patience I knew he could scarcely feel, for we were fools to be dallying thus on the way in broad morning when we should be harking back to our friends as secretly as the fox.
“Were you on the ocean?” he asked the bard, whose rapture was not abated.
“Never,” said he, “but I know Linnhe and Loch Eil and the fringe of Morar.”
“Mere dubs,” said M’Iver, pleasantly—“mere dubs or ditches. Now I, Barbreck, have been upon the deeps, tossed for days at hazard without a headland to the view. I may have made verse on the experience,—I’ll not say yea or nay to that,—but I never gave a lochan credit for washing the bulged sides of the world.”
“You hadn’t fancy for it, my good fellow,” said the bard, angry again. “I forgot to say that I saw Loch Finne too, and the Galley of Lorn taking MacCailein off from his castle. I’m making a song on that now.”
“Touched!” thinks I, for it was a rapier-point at my comrade’s very marrow. He reddened at once, pulled down his brows, and scanned the bard of Keppoch, who showed his knowledge of his advantage.
“If I were you,” said John in a little, “I would not put the finish on that ditty till I learned the end of the transaction. Perhaps MacCailein (and God bless my chief!) is closer on Lochiel and Lochaber to-day than you give him credit for.”
“Say nothing about that,” said I warningly in English to my friend, never knowing (what I learned on a later occasion) that John Lorn had the language as well as myself.
“When MacCailein comes here,” said the bard, “he’ll get a Badenoch welcome.”
“And that is the thief’s welcome, the shirt off his very back,” cried M’Iver.
“Off his back very likely,” said the bard; “it’s the back we see oftenest of the bonny gentleman.”
M’Iver grew livid to the very lip, and sprang to his feet, dutching with great menace the black knife he had been whittling with. Not a bit abashed, the bard pulled out his dirk, and there was like to be a pretty to-do when I put between them.
The issue of the quarrel that thus I retarded was postponed altogether by a circumstance that changed the whole course of our adventure in this wild country,—severed us at a sharp wrench from the Campbell regiments, and gave us the chance—very unwelcome it was—of beholding the manner of war followed by Alasdair MacDonald’s savage tribes. It happened in a flash, without warning. No blow had been struck by the two gentlemen at variance, when we were all three thrown to the ground, and the bound prisoners of a squad of Macgregors who had got out of the thicket and round us unobserved in the heat of the argument.
They treated us all alike—the bard as curt as the Campbells, in spite of his tartan,—and without exchanging any words with us marched us before them on a journey of several hours to Kilcumin.
Long or ever we reached Kilcumin we were manifestly in the neighbourhood of Montrose’s force. His pickets held the road; the hillsides moved with his scouts. On a plain called Leiter-nan-lub the battalion lay camped, a mere fragment of the force that brought ruin to Argile: Athol men under the Tutor of Struan, Stewarts of Appin, Maclans of Glencoe, a few of the more sedate men of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Maclean, as well as a handful of the Gregaraich who had captured us. It was the nightfall when we were turned into the presence of Sir Alasdair, who was sitting under a few ells of canvas playing cartes with some chieftains by the light of a fir-root fire.
“Whom have we here?” said he, never stopping for more than a glimpse of us.
“Two Campbells and a man who says he’s bard of Keppoch,” he was told.
“A spy in an honest tartan, no doubt,” said Sir Alas-dair; “but well put it to the test with Keppoch himself: tell him to come over and throw an eye on the fellow.”
Keppoch was sent for, and came across from a fire at another part of the field, a hiccough at his throat and a blear look in his eye as one that has been overly brisk with the bottle, but still and on the gentleman and in a very good humour.
“Here’s my bard sure enough!” he cried. “John, John, what do you seek in Kilcumin, and in Campbell company too?”
“The company is none of my seeking,” said John Lorn, very short and blunt “And we’re like to have a good deal more of the same clan’s company than we want before long, for Argile and his clan to three times your number are at Inverlochy. I have tramped a weary day to tell you the tale, and I get but a spy’s reception.”
The tale went round the camp in the time a man would whistle an air. Up came Montrose on the instant, and he was the first to give us a civil look. But for him we had no doubt got a short quittance from MacColkitto, who was for the tow gravatte on the spot Instead we were put on parole when his lordship learned we had been Cavaliers of fortune. The moon rose with every sign of storm, the mountains lay about white to their foundations, and ardent winds belched from the glens, but by mountain and glen Mac Donald determined to get round on the flank of Argile.
The month of January, as our old Gaelic notion has it, borrows three days from July for a bribe of three young lambs. Those three days we call Faoilteaeh, and often they are very genial and cheerful days, with a sun that in warmth is a sample of the mellow season at hand. But this year, as my history has shown, we had no sign of a good Faoilteach, and on the morning of the last day of January, when Alasdair MacDonald’s army set over the hills, it was wild, tempestuous weather. A wind rose in the dawning and increased in vehemence as the day aged, and with it came a storm of snow—the small bitter sifting snow that, encountered on the hill, stings like the ant and drifts in monstrous and impassable wreaths. Round about us yawned the glens, to me nameless, mysterious, choked to the throat with snow-mist that flapped and shook like grey rags. The fields were bleak and empty; the few houses that lay in the melancholy plain were on no particularly friendly terms with this convocation of Erse-men and wild kerns: they shut their doors steadfastly on our doings, and gave us not even the compliment of looking on at our strange manoeuvres. There was but one exception, in a staunch and massive dwelling,—a manifest baron keep or stout domicile of that nature, just on the border of the Meld in which the camp was pitched: it was apparently in the charge of two old spinster sisters whose men-folk were afield somewhere else, for they had shuttered the windows, barricaded the gates, and ever and anon would they show blanched faces as the tumult of our preparation disturbed them, and they came to the door and cunningly pulled it open a little and looked out on this warlike array. If a soldier made a step in their direction they fled inside with terror, and their cries rang in the interior.
Those two spinsters—very white, very thin clad for a morn so rigorous, and with a trepidation writ on every feature—were all that saw us off on our march to the south-east They came out and stood hand in hand on the door-stoop, and I have little doubt the honest bodies thanked the God of Israel that the spoilers were departed furth their neighbourhood.
The country we now plunged into, as may be guessed, was a terra incognita to me. Beyond that it was Bade-noch and an unhealthy clime for all that wear the Campbell tartan, I could guess no more. It was after these little wars were over I discovered the names of the localities—the glens, mounts, passes, streams, and drove-roads—over which we passed in a march that Gustavus never faced the like of.
With good judgment enough our captors put a small advance-guard ahead, a score of Airlie’s troopers, swanky blaspheming persons, whose horses pranced very gaily up Glen Tarf, guided by John Lom. M’Iver and I walked together with the main body, quite free and unfettered, sometimes talking with affability to our captors. The Irish were in good humour; they cracked jokes with us in their peculiar Gaelic that at first is ill for a decent Gael of Albion to follow, if uttered rapidly, but soon becomes as familiar as the less foreign language of the Athole men, whose tongue we Argiles find some strange conceits in. If the Irish were affable, the men of our own side of the ocean were most singularly morose—small wonder, perhaps, for we have little reason to love each other. Sour dogs! they gloomed at us under their bonnets and swore in their beards. I have no doubt but for their gentry there had been dirks in us before we reached Corryarick.
It was with the repartee of the Irish and the scowls of the Gaels we went up the rough valley of the Tarf, where the wind moaned most drearily and drove the thin fine snow like a smoke of burning heather. But when we got to the pass of Corryarick our trials began, and then such spirit did M’Iver put in the struggle with the task before us, such snatches of song, sharp saying and old story,—such commradary as it might be named,—that we were on good terms with all. For your man of family the Gael has ever some regard. M’Iver (not to speak of myself) was so manifestly the duine-uasail that the coarsest of the company fell into a polite tone, helped to their manners to some degree no doubt by the example of Montrose and Airlie, who at the earliest moments of our progress walked beside us and discoursed on letters and hunting, and soldiering in the foreign wars.
The pass of Corryarick met us with a girning face and white fangs. On Tarf-side there was a rough bridle-path that the wind swept the snow from, and our progress was fairly easy. Here the drifts lay waist high, the horses plunged to the belly-bands, the footmen pushed through in a sweat. It was like some Hyperborean hell, and we the doomed wretches sentenced to our eternity of toil. We had to climb up the shoulder of the hill, now among tremendous rocks, now through water unfrozen, now upon wind-swept ice, but the snow—the snow—the heartless snow was our constant companion. It stood in walls before, it lay in ramparts round us, it wearied the eye to a most numbing pain. Unlucky were they who wore trews, for the same clung damply to knee and haunch and froze, while the stinging sleet might flay the naked limb till the blood rose among the felt of the kilted, but the suppleness of the joints was unmarred.
It was long beyond noon when we reached the head of the pass, and saw before us the dip of the valley of the Spey. We were lost in a wilderness of mountain-peaks; the bens started about us on every hand like the horrors of a nightmare, every ben with its death-sheet, menacing us, poor insects, crawling in our pain across the landscape.
I thought we had earned a halt and a bite of meat by this forenoon of labour; and Montrose himself, who had walked the pass on foot like his fellows, seemed anxious to rest, but Sir Alasdair pushed us on like a fate relentless.
“On, on,” he cried, waving his long arms to the prospect before; “here’s but the start of our journey; far is the way before; strike fast, strike hot! Would ye eat a meal with appetite while the Diarmaids wait in the way?”
M’iver, who was plodding beside MacDonald when he said these words, gave a laugh. “Take your time, Sir Sandy,” said he; “you’ll need a bowl or two of brose ere you come to grips with MacCailein.”
“Well never come to grips with MacCailein,” said MacDonald, taking the badinage in good part, “so long as he has a back-gate to go out at or a barge to sail off in.”
“I could correct you on that point in a little affair of arms as between gentlemen—if the time and place were more suitable,” said M’Iver, warmly.
“Let your chief defend himself, friend,” said MacDonald. “Man, I’ll wager we never see the colour of his face when it comes to close quarters.”
“I wouldn’t wonder,” I ventured. “He is in no great trim for fighting, for his arm is——”
Sir Alasdair gave a gesture of contempt and cried, “Faugh! we’ve heard of the raxed arm: he took care when he was making his tale that he never made it a raxed leg.”
Montrose edged up at this, with a red face and a somewhat annoyed expression. He put his gloved hand lightly on MacDonald’s shoulder and chided him for debate with a prisoner of war.
“Let our friends be, Alasdair,” he said, quietly. “They are, in a way, our guests: they would perhaps be more welcome if their tartan was a different hue, but in any case we must not be insulting them. Doubtless they have their own ideas of his lordship of Argile——”
“I never ask to serve a nobler or a more generous chief,” said M’Iver, firmly.
“I would expect no other sentiment from a gentleman of Argile’s clan. He has ever done honestly enough by his own people. But have we not had enough of this? We are wasting our wind that should be more precious, considering the toils before us.”
We found the descent of Corryarick even more ill than its climbing. The wind from the east had driven the snow into the mouth of it like a wedge. The horses, stepping ahead, more than once slipped into drifts that rose to their necks. Then they became wild with terror, dashed with frantic hooves into deeper trouble, or ran back, quivering in every sinew and snorting with affright till the troopers behove to dismount and lead them. When we in the van reached the foot of the come we looked back on a spectacle that fills me with new wonder to this day when I think of it,—a stream of black specks in the distance dropping, as it were, down the sheer face of white; nearer, the broken bands of different clansmen winding noiselessly and painfully among the drifts, their kilts pinned between their thighs, their plaids crossed on their chests—all their weapons a weariness to them.
In the afternoon the snow ceased to fall, but the dusk came on early notwithstanding, for the sky was blotted over with driving clouds.
At the head of Glen Roy the MacDonalds, who had lost their bauchles of brogues in the pass, started to a trot, and as the necessity was we had to take up the pace too. Long lank hounds, they took the road like deer, their limbs purple with the cold, their faces pinched to the aspect of the wolf, their targets and muskets clattering about them. “There are Campbells to slay, and suppers to eat,” the Major-General had said. It would have given his most spiritless followers the pith to run till morning across a strand of rock and pebble. They knew no tiring, they seemingly felt no pain in their torn and bleeding feet, but put mile after mile below them.
But the Campbells were not in Glen Roy. They had been there and skirmished for a day among their old foes and had gone back to Lochyside, little thinking the fires they left in the Cameron barns at morning would light the enemy on ere night The roofs still smouldered, and a granary here and there on the sides of the valley sent up its flames,—at once a spur to the spirit of the MacDonalds and a light to their vengeance.
We halted for the night in Glen Spean, with Ben Chlin-aig looming high to the south, and the river gulping in ice beside our camp. Around was plenty of wood: we built fires and ate as poor a meal as the Highlands ever granted in a bad year, though it was the first break in our fast for the day. Gentle and simple, all fared alike—a whang of barley bannock, a stirabout of oat-and-water, without salt, a quaich of spirits from some kegs the troopers carried, that ran done before the half of the corps had been served. Sentinels were posted, and we slept till the morning pipe with sweet weariness in our bones.
Our second day was a repetition of the first. We left without even a breakfast whenever the pipers set up the Cameron rant, “Sons of the dogs, O come and get flesh!” The Campbells had spoiled the bridge with a charge of powder, so we had to ford the river among the ice-lumps, MacDonald showing the way with his kilt-tail about his waist A hunter from a hamlet at the glen foot gladly left the smoking ruin of his home and guided us on a drove-road into the wilds of Lochaber, among mountains more stupendous than those we had left behind. These relentless peaks were clad with blinding snow. The same choking drifts that met us in Corryarick filled the passes between Stob Choire and Easan Mor and Stob Ban, that cherish the snow in their crannies in the depths of midsummer. Hunger was eating at our hearts when we got to Glen Nevis, but the glen was empty of people, and the second night fell ere we broke fast.
I have hungered many times on weary marches, but yon was the most cruel hunger of my life. And though the pain of the starving could be dulled a little by draughts of water from the wayside springs, what there was no remede for was the weakness that turned the flesh in every part of me to a nerveless pulp. I went down Nevis Glen a man in a delirium. My head swam with vapours, so that the hillside seemed to dance round and before me. If I had fallen in the snow I should assuredly have lain there and died, and the thought of how simple and sweet it would be to stretch out my heavy limbs and sleep the sleep for ever, more than once robbed me of my will. Some of the Stewarts and Camerons, late recruits to the army, and as yet not inured to its toils, fell on the wayside halfway down the glen. Mac Donald was for leaving them—“We have no need for weaklings,” he said, cruelly, fuming at the delay; but their lairds gave him a sharp answer, and said they would bide bye them till they had recovered. Thus a third of our force fell behind us in the march, and I would have been behind too, but for M’Iver’s encouragement. His songs were long done; his stories chilled on his lip. The hunger had him at the heart, but he had a lion’s will and a lion’s vigour.
“For the love of God!” he said to me, “do not let them think we are so much of the Covenanter that we cannot keep up! For a Scots Cavalier you are giving in over early.”
“Campaigning with Mackay was never like this,” I pleaded, wearily; “give me the open road and an enemy before me, and I would tramp gaily to the world’s end. Here’s but a choked ravine the very deer abhor in such weather, and before us but a battle we must not share in.”
He said never a word for a few moments, but trudged on. My low-heeled shoon were less fitted for the excursion than his close-thonged brogues that clung to the feet like a dry glove, and I walked lamely. Ever and anon he would look askance at me, and I was annoyed that he should think me a poorer mountaineer than those unwearied knaves who hurried us. I must have shown my feeling in my face, for in a little he let-on to fall lame too, and made the most grievous complaint of ache and weariness. His pretence deceived me but for a little. He was only at his old quirk of keeping me in good repaie with myself, but he played the part with skill, letting us both fall behind the general company a little, so that the Mac Donalds might not witness the indignity of it.
Glen Nevis, as I saw it that night in the light of the moon, is what comes to me now in my dreams. I smell the odour of the sweat-drenched, uncleanly deeding of those savage clans about us; I see the hills lift on either hand with splintered peaks that prick among the stars—gorge and ravine and the wide ascending passes filled ever with the sound of the river, and the coarse, narrow drove-road leads into despair. That night the moon rode at the full about a vacant sky. There was not even a vapour on the hills; the wind had failed in the afternoon.
At the foot of the hill Cam Dearg (or the Red Mount), that is one of three gallant mountains that keep company for Nevis Ben the biggest of all, the path we followed made a twist to the left into a gully from which a blast of the morning’s wind had cleaned out the snow as by a giant’s spade.
So much the worse for us, for now the path lay strewn with boulders that the dragoons took long to thread through, and the bare feet of the private soldiers bled redly anew. Some lean high fir-trees threw this part into a shadow, and so it happened that as I felt my way wearily on, I fell over a stone. The fall lost me the last of my senses: I but heard some of the Stewarts curse me for an encumbrance as they stumbled over me and passed on, heedless of my fate, and saw, as in a dwam, one of them who had abraded his knees by his stumble over my body, turn round with a drawn knife that glinted in a shred of moonlight.
I came to, with M’Iver bent over me, and none of our captors at hand.
“I had rather this than a thousand rix-dollars,” said he, as I sat up and leaned on my arm.
“Have they left us?” I asked, with no particular interest in the answer. It could work little difference whatever it might be. “I thought I saw one of them turn on me with a knife.”
“You did,” said M’Iver. “He broke his part of the parole, and is lying on the other side of you, I think with a hole in his breast. An ugly and a treacherous scamp! It’s lucky for us that Montrose or MacColkitto never saw the transaction between this clay and John M’Iver, or their clemency had hardly been so great ‘You can bide and see to your friend,’ was James Grahame’s last words, and that’s the reason I’m here.”
M’Iver lifted me to my feet, and we stood a little to think what we should do. My own mind had no idea save the one that we were bound to keep in touch with the company whose prisoners we were, but M’Iver hinted at an alternative scarce so honest—namely, a desertion and a detour to the left that would maybe lead us to the Campbell army before active hostilities began.
“You would surely not break parole?” said I, surprised, for he was usually as honourable in such matters as any Highlander I ever met.
“Bah!” he cried, pretending contempt at hesitation, though I could perceive by his voice he was somewhat ashamed of the policy he proposed. “Who quitted the contract first? Was it not that Stewart gentleman on your other side who broke it in a most dastardly way by aiming at your life?”
“I’m thankful for the life you saved, John,” said I, “little worth though it seems at this time, but Montrose is not to be held responsible for the sudden impulse of a private. We made our pact as between gentleman and gentleman—let us be going.”
“Oh, very well!” said he, shortly. “Let us be going. After all, we are in a trap anyway we look at all; for half the Stewarts and Gainerons are behind in the wood there, and our flank retreat among these hills might be a tempting of Providence. But are you thinking of this Athole corp and what his kin will be doing to his slayers?”
“I’ll risk it,” I said, shortly. “We may be out of their hands one way or the other before they miss him.”
On a sudden there rose away before us towards the mouth of the glen the sound of a bagpipe. It came on the tranquil air with no break in its uproar, and after a preparatory tuning it broke into an air called “Cogadh no Sith”—an ancient braggart pibroch made by one Macruimen of the Isle of Skye,—a tune that was commonly used by the Campbells as a night-retreat or tattoo.
My heart filled with the strain. It gave me not only the simple illusion that I saw again the regimentals of my native country—many a friend and comrade among them in the shelter of the Castle of Inverlochy—but it roused in me a spirit very antique, very religious and moving too, as the music of his own land must in every honest Gael.
“Cruachan for ever!” I said lightly to M’Iver, though my heart was full.
He was as much touched by that homely lilt as myself. “The old days, the old styles!” said he. “God! how that pibroch stings me to the core!” And as the tune came more clearly in the second part, or Crunluadh as we call it, and the player maybe came round a bend of the road, my comrade stopped in his pace and added with what in another I might have thought a sob—“I’ve trudged the world; I have learned many bravadoes, so that my heart never stirred much to the mere trick of an instrument but one, and the piob mhor conquers me. What is it, Colin, that’s in us, rich and poor, yon rude cane-reeds speak so human and friendly to?”
“Tis the Gaelic,” I said, cheered myself by the air. “Never a roar of the drone or a sob of the chanter but’s in the Gaelic tongue.”
“Maybe,” said he, “maybe: I’ve heard the scholars like yourself say the sheepskin and the drones were Roman—that or Spanish, it’s all one to me. I heard them at Boitzenburg when we gave the butt of the gun to Tilly’s soldadoes, they played us into Holstein, and when the ditch of Stralsund was choked with the tartan of Mackay, and our lads were falling like corn before the hook, a Reay piper stood valiantly in front and played a salute. Then and now it’s the pipes, my darling!”
“I would as lief have them in a gayer strain. My fondest memories are of reels I’ve danced to their playing,” I said, and by now we were walking down the glen.
“And of one reel you danced,” said he, quizzingly, “not more than two months gone in a town that was called Inneraora?”
“Two months!” I cried,—“two months! I could have sworn offhand we have been wandering in Lorn and Badenoch for as many years!”
Such spirit did my native pipes, played by a clansman, put in me that my weariness much abated, and we made great progress down the glen, so that before the tune had ceased we were on the back of Montrose’s men as they crept on quietly in the night.
The piper stopped suddenly enough when some shots rang out,—an exchange of compliments between our pickets ahead and some wandering scouts of Argile.
And yonder below us, Loch Linnhe and Locheil glanced in the moonlight, and the strong towers of Inverlochy sat like a scowl on the fringe of the wave!
When we came up with the main body of MacDonald’s army, the country, as I say, was shining in the light of the moon, with only a camp-fire down in the field beside the castle to show in all the white world a sign of human life. We had got the Campbells in the rear, but they never knew it A few of their scouts came out across the fields and challenged our pickets; there was an exchange of musketry, but, as we found again, we were thought to be some of the Lochaber hunters unworthy of serious engagement.
For the second time in so many days we tasted food, a handful of meal to the quaich of water—no more and no less; and James Grahame, Marquis of Montrose, supped his brose like the rest of us, with the knife from his belt doing the office of a horn-spoon.
Some hours after us came up the Camerons, who had fallen behind, but fresher and more eager for fighting than our own company, for they had fallen on a herd of roe on the slope of Sgur an Iolair, and had supped savagely on the warm raw flesh.
“You might have brought us a gigot off your take,” Sir Alasdair said to the leader of them, Dol Ruadh. He was a short-tempered man of no great manners, and he only grunted his response.
“They may well call you Camerons of the soft mouth,” said Alasdair, angrily, “that would treat your comrades so.”
“You left us to carry our own men,” said the chief, shortly; “we left you to find your own deer.”
We were perhaps the only ones who slept at the mouth of Glen Nevis that woeful night, and we slept because, as my comrade said, “What cannot be mended may be well slept on; it’s an ease to the heart.” And the counsel was so wise and our weariness so acute, that we lay on the bare ground till we were roused to the call of a trumpet.
It was St Bridget’s Day, and Sunday morning. A myriad bens around gave mists, as smoke from a censer, to the day. The Athole pipers high-breastedly strutted with a vain port up and down their lines and played incessantly. Alasdair laid out the clans with amazing skill, as M’Iver and I were bound to confess to ourselves,—the horse (with Montrose himself on his charger) in the centre, the men of Clanranald, Keppoch, Locheil, Glengarry, and Maclean, and the Stewarts of Appin behind. MacDonald and O’Kyan led the Irish on the wings.
In the plain we could see Argile’s forces in a somewhat similar order, with the tartan as it should be in the midst of the bataille and the Lowland levies on the flanks. Over the centre waved the black galley of Lorne on a gold standard.
I expressed some doubt about the steadfastness of the Lowlanders, and M’Iver was in sad agreement with me.
“I said it in Glenaora when we left,” said he, “and I say it again. They would be fairly good stuff against foreign troops; but they have no suspicion of the character of Gaelic war. I’m sore feared they’ll prove a poor reed to lean on. Why, in heaven’s name, does Mac-Cailein take the risk of a battle in such an awkward corner? An old soldier like Auchinbreac should advise him to follow the Kilcumin road and join forces with Seaforth, who must be far down Glen Albyn by now.”
As we were standing apart thus, up to us came Ian Lorn, shaking the brogue-money he got from Grahame in his dirty loof. He was very bitter.
“I never earned an honester penny,” he said, looking up almost insolently in our faces, so that it was a temptation to give him a clout on the cunning jowl.
“So Judas thought too, I daresay, when he fingered his filthy shekels,” said I. “I thought no man from Keppoch would be skulking aside here when his pipers blew the onset.”
“Och!” said M’Iver, “what need ye be talking? Bardery and bravery don’t very often go together.”
Ian Lorn scowled blackly at the taunt, but was equal to answer it.
“If the need arise,” said he, “you’ll see whether the bard is brave or not There are plenty to fight; there’s but one to make the song of the fight, and that’s John MacDonald, with your honours’ leave.”
We would, like enough, have been pestered with the scamp’s presence and garrulity a good deal longer; but Montrose came up at that moment and took us aside with a friendly enough beckon of his head.
“Gentlemen,” he said in English, “as cavaliers you can guess fairly well already the issue of what’s to happen below there, and as Cavaliers who, clansmen or no clansmen of the Campbell chief, have done well for old Scotland’s name abroad, I think you deserve a little more consideration at our hands at this juncture than common prisoners of war can lay claim to. If you care you can quit here as soon as the onset begins, abiding of course by your compact to use no arms against my friends. You have no objection?” he added, turning about on his horse and crying to Alasdair.
The Major-General came up and looked at us. “I suppose they may go,” said he,—“though, to tell my mind on the matter, I could devise a simpler way of getting rid of them. We have other methods in Erin O, but as your lordship has taken the fancy, they may go, I daresay. Only they must not join their clan or take arms with them until this battle is over. They must be on the Loch Linnhe road before we call the onset.”
Montrose flushed at the ill-breeding of his officer, and waved us away to the left on the road that led to Argile by Loch Linnhe side, and took us clear of the coming encounter.
We were neither of us slow to take advantage of the opportunity, but set off at a sharp walk at the moment that O’Kyan on the right flank was slowly moving in the direction of Argile’s line.
John broke his sharp walk so quickly into a canter that I wondered what he meant I ran close at his heels, but I forbore to ask, and we had put a good lump of moorland between us and the MacDonalds before he explained.
“You perhaps wondered what my hurry was,” he said, with the sweat standing in beads on his face, though the air was full of frost. “It wasn’t for exercise, as you might guess at anyrate. The fact is, we were within five minutes of getting a wheen Stewart dirks in our doublets, and if there was no brulzie on foot we were even yet as good as lost on Brae Lochaber.”
“How does that happen?” I asked. “They seemed to let us away generously enough and with no great ill-will.”
“Just so! But when Montrose gave us the congé, I happened to turn an eye up Glen Nevis and I saw some tardy Stewarts (by their tartan) come running down the road. These were the lads Dol Ruadh left behind last night, and they could scarcely miss in daylight the corpse we left by the road, and their clansmen missed in the mirk. That was my notion at the first glance I got of them, and when we ran they ran too, and what do you make of that?”
“What we should make of it,” I said in alarm, “is as good a pace into Lorn as we can: they may be on the heels of us now,”—for we were in a little dip of the ground from which the force we had just parted so gladly were not to be seen.
On that point M’Iver speedily assured me.
“No, no!” he said. “If Seumas Grahame himself were stretched out yonder instead of a Glenart cearnoch of no great importance to any one, Alasdair MacDonald would be scarcely zealous fool enough to spoil his battle order to prosecute a private feud. Look at that,” he proceeded, turning round on a little knowe he ran lightly up on and I after him— “Look at that! the battle’s begun.”
We stood on that knowe of Brae Lochaber, and I saw from thence a spectacle whose like, by the grace of God, I have never seen before nor since in its agony for any eye that was friendly to Diarmaid Clan. I need not here set down the sorry end of that day at Inverlochy. It has been written many times, though I harbour no book on my shelves that tells the story. We saw MacDonald’s charge; we saw the wings of Argile’s army—the rotten Lowland levies—break off and skurry along the shore; we saw the lads of the Diarmaid tartan hewn down on the edge of the tide till its waves ran red; but we were as helpless as the rush that waved at our feet. Between us and our friends lay the enemy and our parole—I daresay our parole was forgotten in that terrible hour.
John M’Iver laid him down on the tulaich and clawed with his nails the stunted grass that in wind-blown patches came through the snow. None of my words made any difference on his anguish. I was piping to the surrender of sorrow, nigh mad myself.
The horses of Ogilvie—who himself fell in the brulzie—chased the Lowlanders along the side of Loch Linnhe, and so few of the flying had the tartan that we had no great interest in them, till we saw six men with their plaid-ing cast run unobserved up the plain, wade waist-deep through the Nevis, and come somewhat in our direction. We went down to join them, and ran hard and fast and came on them at a place called the Rhu at the water of Kiachnish.