CHAPTER II
VISIONS OF THE NIGHT
Upon the highest floor of Blair Castle there was a long and spacious apartment, like unto the gallery in Paisley Castle, where John Graham had been married to Jean Cochrane, and which to-day is the drawing-room. To this high place Claverhouse climbed from the room where he had examined the two Englishmen, and here he passed the last hours of daylight on the day before the battle of Killiecrankie. Seating himself at one of the windows, he looked out towards the west, through whose golden gates the sun had begun to enter. Beneath lay a widespreading meadow which reached to the Garry; beyond the river the ground began to rise, and in the distance were the hills covered with heather, with lakes of emerald amid the purple. There are two hours of the day when the soul of man is powerfully affected by the physical world in which we live, and in which, indeed, the things we see become transparent, like a 285 thin veil, and through them the things which are not seen stream in upon the soul. One is sunrise, when there is first a grayness in the east, and then the clouds begin to redden, and afterwards a joyful brightness heralds the appearing of the sun as he drives in rout the reluctant rearguard of the night. The most impressive moment is when all the high lands are bathed in soft, fresh, hopeful sunshine, but the glens are still lying in the cold and dank shadow, so that one may suddenly descend from a place of brightness, where he has been in the eye of the sun, to a land of gloom, which the sun has not yet reached. Sunrise quickens the power that has been sleeping, and calls a man in high hope to the labor of the day, for if there be darkness lingering in the glen, there is light on the lofty table-lands, and soon it will be shining everywhere, when the sun has reached his meridian. And it puts heart into a man to come over the hill and down through the hollows when the sun is rising, for though the woods be dark and chill, the traveller is sure of the inevitable victory of the light.
Yet more imperious and irresistible is the impression of sunset as Dundee saw the closing pageant of the day on the last evening of his life. When first he looked the green plain 286 was flooded with gentle light which turned into gold the brown, shaggy Highland cattle scattered among the grass, and made the river as it flashed out and in among the trees a chain of silver, and took the hardness from the jagged rocks that emerged from the sides of the hills. As the sun entered in between high banks of cloud, the light began to fade from the plain, and it touched the river no more; but above the clouds were glowing and reddening like a celestial army clad in scarlet and escorting home to his palace a victorious general. In a few minutes the sun has disappeared, and the red changes into violet and delicate, indescribable shades of green and blue, like the color of Nile water. Then there is a faint flicker, sudden and transient, from the city into which the sun has gone, and the day is over. As the monarch of the day withdraws, the queen of the night takes possession, and Claverhouse, leaning his chin upon his hand and gazing from the sadness of his eyes across the valley, saw the silver light, clear, beautiful, awful, flood the mountains and the level ground below, till the outstanding hills above, and the cattle which had lain down to rest in the meadow, were thrown out as in an etching, with exact and distinct outlines. 287 The day, with its morning promise, with its noontide heat, with its evening glory, was closed, completed and irrevocable. The night, in which no man can work, had come, and in the cold and merciless light thereof every man’s work was revealed and judged. The weird influence of the hour was upon the imagination of an impressionable man, and before him he saw the history of his life. It seemed only a year or so since he was a gay-hearted lad upon the Sidlaw hills, and yesterday since he made his first adventure in arms, with the army of France. Again he is sitting by the camp-fire in the Low Country, and crossing swords for the first time with Hugh MacKay, with whom he is to settle his warfare to-morrow. He is again pledging his loyalty to King James at Whitehall, whom he has done his best to serve, and who has been but a sorry master to him. His thoughts turn once more to the pleasaunce of Paisley Castle, he hears again the jingling of the horses’ bits as he pledges his troth to his bride. Across the moss-hags, where the horses plunge in the ooze and the mist encircles the troopers, he is hunting his Covenanting prey, and catches the fearless face of some peasant zealot as he falls pierced with bullets. Jean weaves her arms round 288 his neck, for once in her life a tender and fearful woman, pleading that he should withdraw from the fight and live quietly with her at home, and then, more like herself, she rages in the moment of his mad jealousy and her unquenchable anger. To-morrow he would submit to the final arbitrament of arms the cause for which he had lived, and for which the presentiment was upon him that he would die, and the quarrel begun between him and MacKay fifteen years ago, between the sides they represent centuries ago, would be settled. If the years had been given back to him to live again, he would not have had them otherwise. Destiny had settled for him his politics and his principles, for he could not leave the way in which Montrose had gone before, or be the comrade of Covenanting Whigs. It would have been a thing unnatural and impossible. And yet he feared that the future was with them and not with the Jacobites. He only did his part in arresting fanatical hillmen and executing the punishment of the law upon them, but he would have been glad that night if he had not been obliged to shoot John Brown of Priest Hill before his wife’s eyes, and keep guard at the scaffold from which Pollock went home to God. He had never loved any 289 other woman than Jean Cochrane, and they were well mated in their high temper of nature, but their marriage had been tempestuous, and he was haunted with vague misgivings. What light was given him he had followed, but there was little to show for his life. His king had failed him, his comrades had distrusted him, his nation hated him. His wife––had she forgiven him, and was she true-hearted to him still? Behind high words of loyalty and hope his heart had been sinking, and now it seemed to him in the light of eternal judgment, wherein there is justice but no charity, that his forty years had failed and were leaving behind them no lasting good to his house or to his land. The moonlight shining full upon Claverhouse shows many a line now on the smoothness of his fair girl face, and declares his hidden, inextinguishable sorrow, who all his days had been an actor in a tragedy. He had written to the chiefs that all the world was with him, but in his heart he knew that it was against him, and perhaps also God.
Once and again Grimond had come into the gallery to summon his master to rest, but seeing him absorbed in one of his reveries had quietly withdrawn. Full of anxiety, for he knows what the morrow will mean, that faithful 290 servitor at last came near and rustled to catch his master’s ear.
“Jock,” said Claverhouse, startling and rising to his feet, “is that you, man, coming to coax me to my bed as ye did lang syne, when ye received me first from my nurse’s hands? It’s getting late, and I am needing rest for to-morrow’s work, if I can get it. We have come to Armageddon, as the preachers would say, and mony things for mony days hang on the issue. All a man can do, Jock, is to walk in the road that was set before him from a laddie, and to complete the task laid to his hand. What will happen afterwards doesna concern him, so be it he is faithful. Where is my room? And, hark ye, Jock, waken me early, and be not far from me through the night, for I can trust you altogether. And there be not mony true.”
Worn out with a long day in the saddle, and the planning of the evening together with many anxieties, and the inward tumult of his mind, Claverhouse fell asleep. He was resting so quietly that Grimond, who had gone to the door to listen, was satisfied and lay down to catch an hour or two of sleep for himself, for he could waken at any hour he pleased, and knew that soon after daybreak he must be stirring. While he was nearby 291 heavy with sleep, his master, conscious or unconscious, according as one judges, was in the awful presence of the unseen. He woke suddenly, as if he had been called, and knew that someone was in the room, but also in the same instant that it was not Grimond or any visitor of flesh and blood. Twice had the wraith of the Grahams appeared to him, and always before a day of danger, but this time it was no sad, beautiful woman’s face, carrying upon its weird grace the sorrows of his line, but the figure of a man that loomed from the shadow. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and the room was so dark that he could only see that someone was there, but could not tell who it was or by what name he would be called. Then the moon struggled out from behind her covering, and sent a shaft of light into the gloomy chamber, with its dark draping and heavy carved furniture. With the coming of the light Claverhouse, who was not unaccustomed to ghostly sights, for they were his heritage, raised himself in bed, and knowing no fear looked steadily. What he saw thrown into relief against the shadows was the figure of a hillman of the west, and one that in an instant he knew. The Covenanter was dressed in rough homespun hodden gray, stained heavily with the 292 black of the peat holes in which he had been hiding, and torn here and there where the rocks had caught him as he was crawling for shelter. Of middle age, with hair hanging over his ears and beard uncared for, his face bore all the signs of hunger and suffering, as of one who had wanted right food and warmth and every comfort of life for months on end. In his eyes glowed the fire of an intense and honest, but fierce and narrow piety, and with that expression was mingled another, not of anger nor of sorrow, but of reproach, of judgment and of sombre triumph. His hands were strapped in front of him with a stirrup leather, and his head was bare. As the moon shone more clearly, Claverhouse saw other stains than those of peat upon his chest, and while he looked the red blood seemed to rise from wounds that pierced his heart and lungs, it flowed out again in a trickling stream, and dripped upon the whiteness of his hands. More awful still, there was a wound in his forehead, and part of his head was shattered. The scene had never been absent long from Claverhouse’s memory, and now he reacted it again. How this man had been caught after a long pursuit, upon the moor, how he had stood bold and unrepentant before the man 293 that had power of life and death over him, how he refused to take the oath of loyalty to the king, how he had been shot dead before his cottage, and how his wife had been spectator of her husband’s death.
“Ye have not forgot me, John Graham of Claverhouse, nor the deed which ye did at Priest Hill in the West Country. I am John Brown, whom ye caused to be slain for the faith of the saints and their testimony, and whom ye set free from the bondage of man forever. Behold, I have washed my robes and made them white in better blood than this, but I am sent in the garment o’ earth, sair stained wi’ its defilement, and in my ain unworthy blude, that ye may ken me and believe that I am sent.”
“What I did was according to law,” answered Claverhouse, unshaken by the sight, “and in the fulfilling of my commission, though God knows I loved not the work, and have oftentimes regretted thy killing. For that and all the deeds of this life I shall answer to my judge and not to man. What wilt thou have with me, what hast thou to do with me? Had it been the other way and I had fallen at Drumclog, I had not troubled thee or any of thy kind.”