CHAPTER XXII.—DAME DUBH.
We had eaten to the last crumb, and were ready to be going, when again I asked Gordon what had come over Argile.
“I’ll tell you that,” said he, bitterly; but as he began, some wildfowl rose in a startled flight to our right and whirred across the sky.
“There’s some one coming,” said M’Iver; “let us keep close together.”
From where the wildfowl rose, the Dame Dubh, as we called the old woman of Carnus, came in our direction, half-running, half-walking through the snow. She spied us while she was yet a great way off, stopped a second as one struck with an arrow, then continued her progress more eagerly than ever, with high-piped cries and taunts at us.
“O cowards!” she cried; “do not face Argile, or the glens you belong to. Cowards, cowards, Lowland women, Glencoe’s full of laughter at your disgrace!”
“Royal’s my race, I’ll not be laughed at!” cried Stewart.
“They cannot know of it already in Glencoe!” said M’Iver, appalled.
“Know it!” said the crone, drawing nearer and with still more frenzy; “Glencoe has songs on it already. The stench from Invcrlochy’s in the air; it’s a mock in Benderloch and Ardgour, it’s a nightmare in Glenurchy, and the women are keening on the slopes of Cladich. Cowards, cowards, little men, cowards! all the curses of Conan on you and the black rocks; die from home, and Hell itself reject you!”
We stood in front of her in a group, slack at the arms and shoulders, bent a little at the head, affronted for the first time with the full shame of our disaster. All my bright portents of the future seemed, as they flashed again before me, muddy in the hue, an unfaithful man’s remembrance of his sins when they come before him at the bedside of his wife; the evasions of my friends revealed themselves what they were indeed, the shutting of the eyes against shame.
The woman’s meaning. Master Gordon could only guess at, and he faced her composedly.
“You are far off your road,” he said to her mildly, but she paid him no heed.
“You have a bad tongue, mother,” said M’Iver.
She turned and spat on his vest, and on him anew she poured her condemnation.
“You, indeed, the gentleman with an account to pay, the hero, the avenger! I wish my teeth had found your neck at the head of Aora Glen.” She stood in the half-night, foaming over with hate and evil words, her taunts stinging like asps.
“Take off the tartan, ladies!” she screamed; “off with men’s apparel and on with the short-gown.”
Her cries rang so over the land that she was a danger bruiting our presence to the whole neighbourhood, and it was in a common panic we ran with one accord from her in the direction of the loch-head. The man with the want took up the rear, whimpering as he ran, feeling again, it might be, a child fleeing from maternal chastisement: the rest of us went silently, all but Stewart, who was a cocky little man with a large bonnet pulled down on the back of his head like a morion, to hide the absence of ears that had been cut off by the law for some of his Appin adventures. He was a person who never saw in most of a day’s transactions aught but the humour of them, and as we ran from this shrieking beldame of Camus, he was choking with laughter at the ploy.
“Royal’s my race,” said he at the first ease to our running—“Royal’s my race, and I never thought to run twice in one day from an enemy. Stop your greeting, Callum, and not be vexing our friends the gentlemen.”
“What a fury!” said Master Gordon. “And that’s the lady of omens! What about her blessing now?”
“Ay, and what about her prophecies?” asked M’Iver, sharply. “She was not so far wrong, I’m thinking, about the risks of Inverlochy; the heather’s above the gall indeed.”
“But at any rate,” said I, “MacCailein’s head is not on a pike.”
“You must be always on the old key,” cried M’Iver, angrily. “Oh man, man, but you’re sore in want of tact” His face was throbbing and hoved. “Here’s half-a-dozen men,” said he, “with plenty to occupy their wits with what’s to be done and what’s to happen them before they win home, and all your talk is on a most vexatious trifle. Have you found me, a cousin of the Marquis, anxious to query our friends here about the ins and outs of the engagement? It’s enough for me that the heather’s above the gall. I saw this dreary morning the sorrow of my life, and I’m in no hurry to add to it by the value of a single tear.”
Sonachan was quite as bitter. “I don’t think,” said he, “that it matters very much to you, sir, what Argile may have done or may not have done; you should be glad of your luck (if luck it was and no design), that kept you clear of the trouble altogether.” And again he plunged ahead of us with Ardkinglas, to avoid my retort to an impertinence that, coming from a younger man, would have more seriously angered me.
The minister by now had recovered his wind, and was in another of his sermon moods, with this ruffling at Mac-Cailein’s name as his text.
“I think I can comprehend,” said he, “all this unwillingness to talk about my lord of Argile’s part in the disaster of to-day. No Gael though I am, I’m loath myself to talk about a bad black business, but that’s because I love my master—for master he is in scholarship, in gifts, in every attribute and intention of the Christian soldier. It is for a different reason, I’m afraid, that our friend Barbreck shuffles.”
“Barbreck never shuffles,” said John, stiffly. “If he did in this matter, it would be for as true an affection for his chief as any lalland cleric ever felt for his patron.”
“And yet, sir, you shuffle for another reason too. You do not want to give your ridiculous Highland pride the shock of hearing that your chief left in a galley before the battle he lost had well begun.”
A curious cry came from M’Iver’s lips. He lifted his face, lined with sudden shadows, to the stars that now were lighting to the east, and I heard his teeth grind.
“So that’s the bitter end of it!” said I to myself, stunned by this pitiful conclusion. My mind groped back on the events of the whole waeful winter. I saw Argile again at peace among his own people; I heard anew his clerkly but wavering sentiment on the trade of the sword; I sat by him in the mouth of Glen Noe, and the song and the guess went round the fire. But the picture that came to me first and stayed with me last was Argile standing in his chamber in the castle of Inneraora, the pallor of the study on his face, and his little Archie, with his gold hair and the night-gown, running out and clasping him about the knees.
We struggled through the night, weary men, hungry men. Loch Leven-head may be bonny by day, but at night it is far from friendly to the unaccustomed wanderer. Swampy meadows frozen to the hard bone, and uncountable burns, and weary ascents, and alarming dips, lie there at the foot of the great forest of Mamore. And to us, poor fugitives, even these were less cruel than the thickets at the very head where the river brawled into the loch with a sullen surrender of its mountain independence.
About seven or eight o’clock we got safely over a ford and into the hilly country that lies tumbled to the north of Glencoe. Before us lay the choice of two routes, either of them leading in the direction of Glenurchy, but both of them hemmed in by the most inevitable risks, especially as but one of all our party was familiar (and that one but middling well) with the countryside. “The choice of a cross-road at night in a foreign land is Tall John’s pick of the farmer’s daughters,” as our homely proverb has it; you never know what you have till the morn’s morning. And our picking was bad indeed, for instead of taking what we learned again was a drove-road through to Tynree, we stood more to the right and plunged into what after all turned out to be nothing better than a corrie among the hills. It brought us up a most steep hillside, and landed us two hours’ walk later far too much in the heart and midst of Glencoe to be for our comfort. From the hillside we emerged upon, the valley lay revealed, a great hack among the mountains.