On the way back the herd-boy gained a recollection to last him for life, and to suggest an incident in Waverley. At nightfall they bivouacked on one of those bare moors that so much appalled Andrew Fairservice, swept by a frosty wind which did not much trouble the hardy escort.
The Highlanders, sheltered by their plaids, lay down in the heath comfortably enough, but the Lowlanders had no protection whatever. Rob Roy, observing this, directed one of his followers to afford the old man a portion of his plaid; “for the callant (boy), he may,” said the freebooter, “keep himself warm by walking about and watching the cattle.” My informant heard this sentence with no small distress; and as the frost wind grew more and more cutting, it seemed to freeze the very blood in his young veins. He had been exposed to weather all his life, he said, but never could forget the cold of that night; in so much that, in the bitterness of his heart, he cursed the bright moon for giving no heat with so much light. At length the sense of cold and weariness became so intolerable that he resolved to desert his watch to seek some repose and shelter. With that purpose he couched himself down behind one of the most bulky of the Highlanders, who acted as Lieutenant to the party. Not satisfied with having secured the shelter of the man’s large person, he coveted a share of his plaid, and by imperceptible degrees drew a corner of it round him. He was now comparatively in paradise, and slept sound till daybreak, when he awoke and was terribly afraid on observing that his nocturnal operations had altogether uncovered the dhuiniewassell’s neck and shoulders, which, lacking the plaid which should have protected them, were covered with cranreuch (i.e. hoar frost). The lad rose in great dread of a beating, at least, when it should be found how luxuriously he had been accommodated at the expense of a principal person of the party. Good Mr. Lieutenant, however, got up and shook himself, rubbing off the hoar frost with his plaid, and muttering something of a cauld neight.
After Culloden, for a time, Menteith farmers might sit in a worse plight than before. While the blackmail insurance was no longer to be depended on, a banditti of broken rebels ensconced themselves above the lakeland passes in fastnesses like the crags of Ben Venue, from which they sallied forth on depredations now unchecked by any spirit of clan loyalty, or neighbourly alliances. Their reign of robbery was overthrown mainly through the exertions of Mr. Nicol Graham of Gartmore, whose descendant in our time has not always been hot on the side of law and order, while a forbear of theirs had shown the family spirit in refusing to pay tribute to Rob Roy. This gentleman stirred up the Government to military battues, which, guided by his experience and knowledge of the country, had more success than Captain Thornton’s expedition, till the robbers were rooted out of their lairs, scattered, banished, or executed. Mr. Graham accumulated in his library a curious collection of documents which he called “thief-papers,” illustrating the condition of the border country in this troubled time. These papers are understood to have been put into the hands of the romancer who turned them to such famous use, hence, for instance, being taken Mr. Nicol Jarvie’s account of the population and resources of the clans behind the Highland line; and the “change-houses,” like that of Lucky Macalpine at Aberfoyle, are here pointed out as stills of demoralisation.
Even after peace had been won for the villages and farms of the strath, the law was long a little shy of trusting itself among the mountains. Lockhart tells us that Scott’s first acquaintance with the braes of Balquhidder was as a writer’s apprentice, when he accompanied a process server who had to be escorted to the scene of his duty by a party of soldiers, where now a policeman is a rare sight, and few crimes are known to justice but drunkenness with its sequelae. Till a good deal later there were parts on the Welsh borders in much the same state of home rule. An old gentleman not long deceased told me how in the Llanthony Valley, where the late Father Ignatius secluded himself, disputes were settled by a sort of rough lynch law; and in the next valley, within living memory, the only murder known had been that of a bailiff who attempted to serve a writ. In some parts of the United States, if all tales be true, life and property are less safe to-day than they were a century ago in the Highlands—where officers of the law were the last travellers to feel how they carried their lives in their hands.
Scott compares the mountain clans to Afghan tribes, of whom he seems to have been reading some account. A more familiar resemblance is with the Red Indians of the backwoods, so well known to us through Catholic and Puritan adventurers on their borders. There was the same fierce pride, tempered by traits of generosity and scruples of honour; the same hardihood, along with impatience of regular work; in some cases the same veneer of Christian ritual; always the same restless turbulence of young warriors eager to prove their manhood, held more or less in check by the cooler heads of chiefs and counsellors. The moving narratives of the frontier settlers of New York and Pennsylvania give us some idea of what perils Menteith farmers had long to be familiar with, though indeed the wild Highlandmen seldom showed such cruel temper as was religiously cultivated in the Red Indian.
There appears this other difference in the Highlands and the backwoods border feuds, that in the former, the jarring elements were brought into much closer relations, so that love played its part as well as hatred. The inveterate enemies of the wide New World would be separated from each other by great stretches of forest and prairie, through which war parties travelled for days and weeks, by stealthy paths and silent waterways, to fall at advantage upon their unguarded foe. The pale-face settlers could not feel themselves safe from vengeful redskins whose camp-fires were a hundred miles away. It is said that the Indian summer, that serene truce of nature, got its name through the red warriors taking then a last chance of a raid in force upon the frontier, before the snows held them back; yet even in the depth of winter bands of human wolves might come prowling about the lonely blockhouses, to drag away unwary or unlucky victims to a carnival of torture among their distant wigwams. No band of cultivators would care to fix themselves within a dozen miles of a tribe that was being slowly pushed out of its hunting-grounds. But in Menteith and behind its mountain walls, hereditary enemies were so closely packed together that it is hard to understand how they got on without mutual extermination.
We hear, indeed, of occasional raids into this district from so far off as Appin and Lochaber. But also the tale quoted above from Scott shows how near to their prey were caterans, who, in the Lady of the Lake’s time, could push their devastations as far as the Devon valley of the Ochils. We have seen how the Macgregors and the Maclarens ill-neighboured each other in Balquhidder, the latter clan gradually ousted and taking refuge among the Stewarts, who filled the adjacent wilds of Glenfinlas. To the south lay the Buchanans, the Colquhouns, and the “wild Macfarlanes.” To the north were the Macnabs and advanced parties of Murrays. The name of the Dreadnought Hotel at Callander tells us how it was first built by the Laird of Macnab, whose concerns straggled so far from their root on Loch Tay. And all those smaller bodies were pushed upon from opposite sides by the Grahams and the Campbells, powerful enemies whom the older inhabitants would sometimes be able to play off against each other, while sometimes the medley of quarrel seems to have tended to such an awkward shape as that triangular duel in Midshipman Easy.
What the Campbells were in Argyll and Breadalbane, the Grahams were in Menteith, intruders and agents of civilisation, who had to hang their heads for long through a series of miscalculations and misfortunes. The house of Menteith was an unlucky one ever since one of its sons betrayed Wallace; nor did it prosper by the earldom of Strathearn, through which it claimed to inherit the purest strain of royal blood. It sank into misery and extinction, having passed from Menteiths and Stewarts to the Grahams, on whom also a curse seemed to come through the murder of James I. Other branches of this family gained futile distinction, in the meteoric career of Montrose and the dark fame of Claverhouse, who to an uncovenanting generation looks now not so black as he was once painted. The mysterious murder of Lord Menteith’s heir by an intimate friend has been told in The Legend of Montrose. In the next century the empty title was claimed by one who literally died a beggar on the roadside.
The jeune premier, though not the hero, in the Lady of the Lake, was a Graham who appears no further unfortunate than by having a double allowance of powerful rivals, to hinder his course of true love for the daughter of a once greater house that then lay under heavy clouds of royal disfavour. This heroine, we remember, was Ellen Douglas, conveniently exiled to a nook rather out of the way of Douglas power and pride. Did it ever occur to a careless reader to ask why here she had been brought up by an aunt, taking the place of a mother? Looking away from the Grahams a moment, I should like to quote a piece of commentary which my friend Mr. H. R. Allport believes himself to have made for the first time, in a privately-printed volume.
The heroines of the Waverley Novels, with a single prominent exception, are all of them motherless. They had mothers presumably, but their mothers filled untimely graves. The one prominent exception, of course, is Lucy Ashton, whose mother, Lady Ashton, is an important personage in the story. In Waverley there are two heroines, Flora M’Ivor and Rose Bradwardine, who are both motherless. In Guy Mannering there are also two heroines, Julia Mannering and Lucy Bertram, who are both motherless. In Rob Roy the heroine is Die Vernon, who is motherless. In Old Mortality the heroine is Edith Bellenden, who is motherless. In The Heart of Midlothian the heroine is Jeanie Deans, who is motherless. In Ivanhoe there are again two heroines, Rebecca and Rowena, who are both motherless. In Kenilworth the heroine is Amy Robsart, who is motherless. In The Pirate the heroines are Minna and Brenda Troil, who are motherless. In The Fortunes of Nigel the heroine is Margaret Ramsay, who is motherless. In Quentin Durward the heroine is Isabelle, Countess of Croye, who is motherless. In Woodstock the heroine is Alice Lee, who is motherless. In The Fair Maid of Perth the heroine is Catherine Glover, who is motherless. I need not go through the entire list. I believe that Lucy Ashton is the only exception of note.