The clannishness, which is the obverse of such inter-tribal grudges, has not yet died out, albeit on the Stock Exchange a Macgregor makes no better price for a Vich-Alpine than for a son of Somerled. In certain secluded glens and islands is still rooted a minor patriotism which does not wholly wither under the suns of the open world. “A’ Stewarts are no sib to the king!” is the semi-Sassenach’s sneer at distant calling of cousins between crofter and chieftain; yet his cherished memories of descent go far to make the poorest Highlander something of a gentleman. Nor is stretching out of the ties of kindred all upon the inferior side. At least it will be only in recent times that the Highland chief takes shame for his poor relations, who still may keep some rags of the old loyalty. If you ask an English Brown whether he be connected with a namesake, his first impulse is usually towards emphatic denial, especially if he be in a condition to shun “brutes that use the wrong kind of soap.” But the M’Brown is more apt to think twice before repudiating any claim of far-off kinship, a fact cynically explained by conditions, lasting longer in the north than in the south, under which the greatest man’s life and property were safe in proportion to the prevalence of his name and blood. It is not so long ago since a Highlander had such a practical as well as a sentimental interest in seeing about him none but his own tartan.
CHAPTER III
THE LAND OF LORNE
Among all the clans, the most numerous and the most powerful, in modern times, have been the Campbells, who rose on the wreck of the once predominant Macdonalds, ousting and absorbing men of other less auspicious names till the new lords were firmly seated over Argyll and a large part of Perthshire. This prosperity they owed to a knack of choosing the stronger side, whereas Highlanders have been more apt to figure as champions of falling causes. While less practically-minded stocks stood “agin the government,” the Campbells usually proved ready to recognise de facto authority, to catch the flowing tide of fortune, and to turn even godliness to gain in a manner supposed to be more characteristic of the Lowland Scot. But the canniest of clans had better success in earning fear than love from their neighbours. The wilder chiefs looked on Argyll as an obnoxious good boy who pulled out plums for himself from their seething confusion. Their Jacobite sentiments came in part from an ancient respect for hereditary right, in part from preference for a sovereign in no position to enforce obedience; but often it was as much hatred of the Macallum More as love of the Stuarts that drove Lochiels and Clanranalds into unprofitable rebellion. “Fair and false as a Campbell!” is the reproach of sufferers from that pushful race that, to threats and curses, gave back their chuckling byword, “It’s a far cry to Loch Awe!” Jacobite poets are of course very bitter against the line “of him who sold his king for gold”; and when the cottar goodman had “waled a portion” enumerating Job’s sheep and camels, his wife might well opine, “Maybe no the same Cam’ells as at Inveraray, or I doobt there’d no be mony o’ the sheep left.” But in the teeth of all ill-will, “the Campbells are coming!” was the word for centuries, during which they went on serving themselves heirs to the domains of the shadowy Prince Lorne, and supplanting the sons of Somerled, more authentic Lords of the Isles. They were, in short, one of the first clans to be civilised.
INVERARAY CROSS AND CASTLE
I was at school with sons of this house, who were fair but not false; and if its present head robbed me of an expected prize, that was through the Campbell virtue of taking the likeliest means to attain an end. The then Duke himself once attended our prize-day Exhibition, when at the last moment it was well remembered to substitute “Wolsey, I did not think to shed a tear!” or some such stock piece of inoffensive declamation, for Aytoun’s “Burial March of Dundee,” in which a budding Demosthenes had else reviled to their faces “the brood of false Argyle.” So the name was commonly spelt in my days of spelling; but the fashion now changes it to Argyll.
My own great-grandfather was born at Craignish, and it is not for me to speak ill of his mother’s roof-tree. But if truth must be told, antipathy to the modern lords of Lorne has not been confined to alien clans. At school with us was another crew of Campbells, that prided themselves on having kept their independence of the ducal chief, their shrunken lands islanded amid his domain. They had some story which I half forget, of ancestral charters hid away safe in a tree, when their grasping overlord got into his possession those of other Campbells. What I remember noting on a holiday visit was how these boys had been taught not to pass the duke’s march without throwing a stone in sign of undying enmity to the house of Argyll, a pious duty that would come easy to boys in all times, but in our degenerate age was performed with careless good-humour, none of these young mountain-cats being conscious of any personal animosity. Old and new ways of life are mingled in another story of stones which I vaguely recall from a western glen. A Campbell had killed a Cameron—or it may have been the other way on—to whose memorial cairn every passing Cameron added a stone of remembrance, religiously pulled down by every Campbell. Thus the cairn stood waxing and waning by a lonely moorside track, till a Campbell was appointed postman on the beat, and his daily passage gave the monument no fair chance.