CHAPTER XVII.—IN THE LAND OF LORN.
We might well be at our prayers. Appin paid dearly for its merriment in the land of Cailein Mor, and the MacDonalds were mulct most generously for our every hoof and horn. For when we crossed Loch Etive there came behind us from the ruined glens of Lower Lorn hordes of shepherds, hunters, small men of small families, who left their famished dens and holes, hunger sharping them at the nose, the dead bracken of concealment in their hair, to join in the vengeance on the cause of their distress. Without chieftains or authority, they came in savage bands, affronting the sea with their shouts as they swam or ferried; they made up with the wildest of our troops, and ho, ro! for the plaids far and wide on the errands of Hell. In that clear, cold, white weather—the weather of the badger’s dream, as our proverb calls it—we brought these glens unfriendly, death in the black draught and the red wine of fire. A madness of hate seized on us; we glutted our appetites to the very gorge. I must give Argile the credit of giving no licence to our on-goings. He rode after us with his Lowlanders, protesting, threatening, cajoling in vain. Many a remonstrance, too, made Gordon, many an opening fire he stamped out in cot and bam. But the black smoke of the granary belching against the white hills, or the kyloe, houghed and maimed, roaring in its agony, or the fugitive brought bloody on his knees among the rocks—God’s mercy!
Do you know why those unco spectacles were sometimes almost sweet to me, though I was more often a looker-on than a sharer in their horror? It was because I never saw a barn blaze in Appin or Glencoe but I minded on our own black barns in Shira Glen; nor a beast slashed at the sinew with a wanton knife, but I thought of Moira, the dappled one that was the pride of my mother’s byre, made into hasty collops for a Stewart meal. Through this remoter Lorn I went, less conscious of cruelty than when I plied fire and sword with legitimate men of war, for ever in my mind was the picture of real Argile, scorched to the vitals with the invading flame, and a burgh town I cherished reft of its people, and a girl with a child at her neck flying and sobbing among the hills.
Montrose and MacColkitto were far before us, marching up the Great Glen. They had with them the pick of the clans, so we lived, as it were, at free quarters, and made up for weeks of short fare by a time of high feeding.
Over Etive and through the Benderloch, and through Appin and even up to Glencoe, by some strange spasm of physique—for she was frail and famished—the barefooted old cailleach of Carnus came after us, a bird of battle, croaking in a horrible merriment over our operations. The Dark Dame we called her. She would dance round the butchery of the fold, chanting her venomous Gaelic exultation in uncouth rhymes that she strung together as easily as most old people of her kind can do such things in times of passion or trance. She must have lived like a vulture, for no share would she have in our pots, though sometimes she added a relish to them by fetching dainties from houses by the way, whose larders in our masculine ignorance we had overlooked.
“I would give thee the choicest of the world,” she would say. “What is too good for my heroes, O heroes of the myrtle-badge?”
“Sit down and pick,” John Splendid bade her once, putting a roysterer’s playful arm round her waist, and drawing her to the fire where a dinner stewed.
Up she threw her claws, and her teeth were at his neck with a weasel’s instinct But she drew back at a gleam of reason.
“Oh, darling, darling,” she cried, patting him with her foul hands, “did I not fancy for the moment thou wert of the spoilers of my home and honour—thou, the fleet foot, the avenger, the gentleman with an account to pay—on thee this mother’s blessing, for thee this widow’s prayers!”
M’Iver was more put about at her friendliness than at her ferocity, as he shook his plaiding to order and fell back from her worship.
“I’ve seldom seen a more wicked cat,” said he; “go home, grandam, and leave us to our business. If they find you in Lochaber they will gralloch you like a Yule hind.”
She leered, witch-like, at him, clutched suddenly at his sword-hilt, and kissed it with a frenzy of words, then sped off, singing madly as she flew.
We left the Dark Dame on Levenside as we ferried over to Lochaber, and the last we saw of her, she stood knee-deep in the water, calling, calling, calling, through the grey dun morning, a curse on Clan Donald and a blessing on Argile.
His lordship sat at the helm of a barge, his face pallid and drawn with cold, and he sighed heavily as the beldame’s cries came after us.
“There’s little of God’s grace in such an omen,” said he, in English, looking at the dim figure on the shore, and addressing Gordon.
“It could happen nowhere else,” said the cleric, “but in such a ferocious land. I confess it, my lord—I confess it with the bitter shame of surrender, that I behold generations of superstition and savagery still to beat down ere your people are so amenable to the Gospel as the folks of the Lowland shires. To them such a shrieking harridan would be an object of pity and stern measure; they would call her mad as an etter-cap, and keep her in bounds: here she is made something of a prophetess———”
“How?” asked Argile, shortly, and he was looking wistfully at the hills we were leaving—the hills that lay between him and his books.
“There’s not a Highlander in your corps but has bowed his head to her blessing; there’s not one but looks upon her curse of the MacDonalds as so much of a gain in this enterprise.”
“Oh,” said his lordship, “you are a little extravagant We have our foolish ways, Gordon, but we are not altogether heathen; and do you think that after all there might not be something in the portents of a witch like yon in her exaltation?”
“No more than’s in the howling of the wind in the chimney,” said Gordon, quickly.
“Perhaps not,” said Argile, after a little, “perhaps not; but even the piping of the vent has something of prophecy in it, though the wind bloweth where it listeth. I have only a scholar’s interest in these things, I give you my word, and——”
He laughed with a little restraint before he went on.
“Do you know, John,” he called out to M’Iver—“do you know what our cailleach friend says of our jaunt? She put a head in at my tent last night, and ‘Listen, MacCailein,’ said she, ‘and keep on high roads,’ said she, ‘and Inverlochy’s a perilous place,’ said she, ‘and I’d be wae to see the heather above the gall.’”
John Splendid’s back was to him as he sat at the prow of a boat coming close on our stern, but I saw the skin of his neck flame. He never turned: he made no answer for a moment, and when he spoke it was with a laughing allusion in English to the folly of portents.
This was so odd an attitude for a man usually superstitious to take up, that I engaged him on the point whenever we landed.
“You seem to have no great respect for the Dark Dame’s wizardy,” said I.
He took me aside from some of the clansmen who could overhear.
“Never let these lads think that you either lightly Dame Dubh or make overmuch of her talk about the heather and gall, for they prize her blessing, strangely enough, and they might lay too great stress on its failure. You catch me?”
I nodded to keep him going, and turned the thing over in my mind.
“What do you think of the prophecy yourself?” he asked; “is it not familiar?”
In a flash it came to my mind that I had half-hinted to him at what the Macaulay woman had said in the fold of Elrigmore.
“I think,” said I, “the less the brooding on these things the better.”
If we had our own misgivings about the end of this jaunt, our companions had none. They plunged with hearts almost jocular into the woods on Lochaber’s edge, in a bright sunshine that glinted on the boss of the target and on the hilt of the knife or sword, and we came by the middle of the day to the plain on which lay the castle of Inverlochy—a staunch quadrangular edifice with round towers at the angles, and surrounded by a moat that smelled anything but freshly. And there we lay for a base, and thence we sent out round Keppoch and Locheil some dashing companies that carried on the work we began in Athole.
Auchinbreac’s notion, for he was more than my lord the guide of this enterprise, was to rest a day or two in the castle and then follow on the heels of Montrose, who, going up Loch Ness-side, as we knew he was, would find himself checked in front by Seaforth, and so hemmed between two fires.
It was about three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon when Argile sent for M’Iver and myself to suggest a reconnoitring excursion up the Great Glen by the side of the lochs, to see how far the enemy might have reached before us.
“I’m sorry to lose your company, gentlemen,” said he, “even for a day; but this is a delicate embassy, and I can fancy no one better able to carry it through successfully than the two gentlemen who have done more delicate and dangerous work in the ranks of the honourable Scots Brigade.”
“I can say for myself,” said John, “that there’s not a man in Keppoch could guess my nativity or my politics if I had on another tartan than that of the Diarmaid.”
“Ah! you have the tongue, no doubt of it,” said Argile, smiling; “and if a change of colour would make your task less hazardous, why not effect it? I’m sure we could accommodate you with some neutral fabric for kilt and plaid.”
“For the humour of the thing,” said John, “I would like to try it; but I have no notion of getting hanged for a spy. James Grahame of Montrose has enough knowledge of the polite arts of war to know the difference between a spy in his camp in a false uniform and a scout taking all the risks of the road by wearing his own colours. In the one case he would hang us offhand, in the other there’s a hair’s-breadth of chance that he might keep us as hostages.”
“But in any tartan, cousin, you’re not going to let yourself be caught,” said Argile. “We have too much need for you here. Indeed, if I thought you were not certain to get through all right, I would send cheaper men in your place.”
John laughed.
“There’s no more cure,” said he, “for death in a common herd than for the same murrain in an ensign of foot.”
“A scholar’s sentiment!” cried Argile. “Are you taking to the philosophies?”
“It’s the sentiment, or something like it, of your chaplain, Master Gordon,” said John; “he reproved me with it on Dunchuach. But to do myself justice, I was never one who would run another into any danger I was unwilling to face myself.”
The Marquis said no more, so we set about preparing for the journey.
“Well, Elrigmore, here we are running the loupegarthe with MacDonalds on the one side of us and Camerons on the other,” said my comrade, as we set out at the mouth of the evening, after parting from a number of the clan who went up to the right at Spean to do some harrying in Glen Roy.
No gavilliger or provost-marshal ever gave a more hazardous gauntlet to run, thought I, and I said as much; but my musings brought only a good-humoured banter from my friend.
All night we walked on a deserted rocky roadway under moon and star. By the side of Loch Lochy there was not a light to be seen; even the solitary dwellings we crept bye in the early part of our journey were without smoke at the chimney or glimmer at the chink. And on that loch-side, towards the head of it, there were many groups of mean little hovels, black with smoke and rain, with ragged sloven thatch, the midden at the very door and the cattle routing within, but no light, no sign of human occupation.
It was the dawning of the day, a fine day as it proved and propitious to its close, that we ventured to enter one such hut or bothy at the foot of another loch that lay before us. Auchinbreac’s last order to us had been to turn wherever we had indication of the enemy’s whereabouts, and to turn in any case by morning. Before we could go back, however, we must have some sleep and food, so we went into this hut to rest us. It stood alone in a hollow by a burn at the foot of a very high hill, and was tenanted by a buxom, well-featured woman with a herd of duddy children. There was no man about the place; we had the delicacy not to ask the reason, and she had the caution not to offer any. As we rapped at her door we put our arms well out of sight below our neutral plaids, but I daresay our trade was plain enough to the woman when she came out and gave us the Gael’s welcome somewhat grudgingly, with an eye on our apparel to look for the tartan.
“Housewife,” said John M’Iver, blandly, “we’re a bit off our way here by no fault of our own, and we have been on the hillside all night, and——”
“Come in,” she said, shortly, still scrutinising us very closely, till I felt myself flushing wildly. She gave us the only two stools in her dwelling, and broke the peats that smouldered on the middle of her floor. The chamber—a mean and contracted interior—was lit mainly from the door and the smoke-vent, that gave a narrow glimpse of heaven through the black cabar and thatch. Round about the woman gathered her children, clinging at her gown, and their eyes stared large and round in the gloom at the two of us who came so appallingly into their nest.
We sat for a little with our plaids about us, revelling in the solace of the hearty fire that sent wafts of odorous reek round the dwelling; and to our dry rations the woman added whey, that we drank from birch cogies.
“I am sorry I have no milk just now,” she said. “I had a cow till the day before yesterday; now she’s a cow no more, but pith in Colkitto’s heroes.”
“They lifted her?” asked John.
“I would not say they lifted her,” said the woman, readily, “for who would be more welcome to my all than the gentlemen of Keppoch and Seumais Grahame of Montrose?” And again she looked narrowly at our close-drawn plaids.
I stood up, pulled out my plaid-pin, and let the folds off my shoulder, and stood revealed to her in a Diarmaid tartan.
“You see we make no pretence at being other than what we are,” I said, softly; “are we welcome to your whey and to your fire-end?”
She showed no sign of astonishment or alarm, and she answered with great deliberation, choosing her Gaelic, and uttering it with an air to impress us.
“I dare grudge no one at my door,” said she, “the warmth of a peat and what refreshment my poor dwelling can give; but I’ve seen more welcome guests than the spoilers of Appin and Glencoe. I knew you for Campbells when you knocked.”
“Well, mistress,” said M’Iver, briskly, “you might know us for Campbells, and might think the worse of us for that same fact (which we cannot help), but it is to be hoped you will know us for gentlemen too. If you rue the letting of us in, we can just go out again. But we are weary and cold and sleepy, for we have been on foot since yesterday, and an hour among bracken or white hay would be welcome.”
“And when you were sleeping,” said the woman; “what if I went out and fetched in some men of a clan who would be glad to mar your slumber?”
John studied her face for a moment It was a sonsy and simple face, and her eyes were not unkindly.
“Well,” he said, “you might have some excuse for a deed so unhospitable, and a deed so different from the spirit of the Highlands as I know them. Your clan would be little the better for the deaths of two gentlemen whose fighting has been in other lands than this, and a wife with a child at her breast would miss me, and a girl with her wedding-gown at the making would miss my friend here. These are wild times, good wife, wild and cruel times, and a widow more or less is scarcely worth troubling over. I think we’ll just risk you calling in your men, for, God knows, I’m wearied enough to sleep on the verge of the Pit itself.”
The woman manifestly surrendered her last scruple at his deliverance. She prepared to lay out a rough bedding of the bleached bog-grass our people gather in the dry days of spring.
“You may rest you a while, then,” said she. “I have a husband with Keppoch, and he might be needing a bed among strangers himself.”
“We are much in your reverence, housewife,” said John, nudging me so that I felt ashamed of his double-dealing. “That’s a bonny bairn,” he continued, lifting one of the children in his arms; “the rogue has your own good looks in every lineament.”
“Aye, aye,” said the woman, drily, spreading her blankets; “I would need no sight of tartan to guess your clan, master. Your flattery goes wrong this time, for by ill-luck you have the only bairn that does not belong to me of all the brood.”
“Now that I look closer,” he laughed, “I see a difference; but I’ll take back no jot of my compliment to yourself.”
“I was caught yonder,” said he to me a little later in a whisper in English, as we lay down in our corner. “A man of my ordinary acuteness should have seen that the brat was the only unspoiled member of all the flock.”
We slept, it might be a couple of hours, and wakened together at the sound of a man’s voice speaking with the woman outside the door. Up we sat, and John damned the woman for her treachery.
“Wait a bit,” I said. “I would charge her with no treachery till I had good proofs for it I’m mistaken if your lie about your wife and weans has not left her a more honest spirit towards us.”
The man outside was talking in a shrill, high voice, and the woman in a softer voice was making excuses for not asking him to go in. One of her little ones was ill of a fever, she said, and sleeping, and her house, too, was in confusion, and could she hand him out something to eat?
“A poor place Badenoch nowadays!” said the man, petulantly. “I’ve seen the day a bard would be free of the best and an honour to have by any one’s fire. But out with the bannocks and I’ll be going. I must be at Kilcumin with as much speed as my legs will lend me.”
He got his bannocks and he went, and we lay back a while on our bedding and pretended to have heard none of the incident It was a pleasant feature of the good woman’s character that she said never a word of her tactics in our interest.
“So you did not bring in your gentlemen?” said John, as we were preparing to go. “I was half afraid some one might find his way unbidden, and then it was all bye with two poor soldiers of fortune.”
“John MacDonald the bard, John Lorn, as we call him, went bye a while ago,” she answered simply, “on his way to the clan at Kilcumin.”
“I have never seen the bard yet that did not demand his bardic right to kail-pot and spoon at every passing door.”
“This one was in a hurry,” said the woman, reddening a little in confusion.
“Just so,” said M’Iver, fumbling in his hand some coin he had taken from his sporran; “have you heard of the gold touch for fever? A child has been brought from the edge of the grave by the virtue of a dollar rubbed on its brow. I think I heard you say some neighbour’s child was ill? I’m no physician, but if my coin could—what?”
The woman flushed deeper than ever, an angered pride this time in her heat.
“There’s no child ill that I know of,” said she; “if there was, we have gold of our own.”
She bustled about the house and put past her blankets, and out with a spinning-wheel and into a whirr of it, with a hummed song of the country at her lips—all in a mild temper, or to keep her confusion from showing itself undignified.
“Come away,” I said to my comrade in English; “you’ll make her bitterly angry if you persist in your purpose.”
He paid no heed to me, but addressed the woman again with a most ingenious story, apparently contrived, with his usual wit, as he went on with it.
“Your pardon, goodwife,” said he, “but I see you are too sharp for my small deceit I daresay I might have guessed there was no child ill; but for reasons of my own I’m anxious to leave a little money with you till I come back this road again. We trusted you with our lives for a couple of hours there, and surely, thinks I, we can trust you with a couple of yellow pieces.”
The woman stopped her wheel and resumed her good-humour. “I thought,” said she,—“I thought you meant payment for——”
“You’re a bit hard on my manners, goodwife,” said John. “Of course I have been a soldier, and might have done the trick of paying forage with a sergeant’s blunt-ness, but I think I know a Gaelic woman’s spirit better.”
“But are you likely to be passing here again at any time?” cried the woman, doubt again darkening her face, and by this time she had the money in her hand. “I thought you were going back by the Glen?”
“That was our notion,” said my comrade, marvellously ready, “but to tell the truth we are curious to see this Keppoch bard, whose songs we know very well in real Argile, and we take a bit of the road to Kilcumin after him.”
The weakness of this tale was not apparent to the woman, who I daresay had no practice of such trickery as my friend was the master of, and she put the money carefully in a napkin and in a recess beneath one of the roof-joists. Our thanks she took carelessly, no doubt, because we were Campbells.
I was starting on the way to Inverlochy when M’Iver protested we must certainly go a bit of the way to Kilcumin.
“I’m far from sure,” said he, “that that very particular bit of MacDonald woman is quite confident of the truth of my story. At any rate, she’s no woman if she’s not turning it over in her mind by now, and she’ll be out to look the road we take before very long or I’m mistaken.”
We turned up the Kilcumin road, which soon led us out of sight of the hut, and, as my friend said, a glance behind us showed us the woman in our rear, looking after us.
“Well, there’s no turning so long as she’s there,” said I. “I wish your generosity had shown itself in a manner more convenient for us. There’s another example of the error of your polite and truthless tongue! When you knew the woman was not wanting the money, you should have put it in your sporran again, and——”
“Man, Elrigmore,” he cried, “you have surely studied me poorly if you would think me the man to insult the woman—and show my own stupidity at the same time—by exposing my strategy when a bit fancy tale and a short daunder on a pleasant morning would save the feelings of both the lady and myself.”
“You go through life on a zigzag,” I protested, “aiming for some goal that another would cut straight across for, making deviations of an hour to save you a second’s unpleasantness. I wish I could show you the diplomacy of straightforwardness: the honest word, though hard to say sometimes, is a man’s duty as much as the honest deed of hand.”
“Am I not as honest of my word as any in a matter of honour? I but gloze sometimes for the sake of the affection I have for all God’s creatures.”
I was losing patience of his attitude and speaking perhaps with bitterness, for here were his foolish ideas of punctilio bringing us a mile or two off our road and into a part of the country where we were more certain of being observed by enemies than in the way behind us.
“You jink from ambuscade to ambuscade of phrase like a fox,” I cried.
“Call it like a good soldier, and I’ll never quarrel with your compliment,” he said, good-humouredly. “I had the second excuse for the woman in my mind before the first one missed fire.”
“Worse and worse!”
“Not a bit of it: it is but applying a rule of fortification to a peaceful palaver. Have bastion and ravelin as sure as may be, but safer still the sally-port of retreat.”
I stood on the road and looked at him, smiling very smug and self-complacent before me, and though I loved the man I felt bound to prick a hole in his conceit.
But at that moment a dead branch snapped in a little plantation that lay by the way, and we turned quickly to see come to us a tall lean man in MacDonald clothing.