CHAPTER IX.
THE RED PRIEST OF APPLECROSS.
I heard, with the utmost alarm, the relation of all that had passed, and felt assured that my doom and the doom of our people were sealed. To Mr. Snaggs, Callum had said nothing more than I would have said, but the chances are that, had I encountered him, my bearing might have been more violent.
'The glen will be swept like Glentuirc,' said Callum, as we descended the hill slowly and thoughtfully; 'swept bare as my hand, devil a doubt of it.'
'And the old jointure-house, Callum—our last home on earth—sick and ailing as my poor mother is, how is she ever to be got out of it?'
'Never alive, I fear me.'
I shuddered at his answer, for he as well as I knew the strange old tradition connected with it.
Lachlan Mohr Mac Innon, about twenty years before his fall at Worcester, had been seized by a covenanting and reformatory spirit, and while the fervour lasted, had demolished an ancient chapel of St. Colme, and with the stones thereof, built the said jointure-house. This was considered an act of sacrilege so deep, that the Mac Donalds of Keppoch, and other Catholic tribes, were on the point of marching in hostile array to Glen Ora, when the influence of a wandering monk of the Scottish mission restrained them. This personage, whose adventures have been given to the world as the Capuchino Scozzese, and who is still remembered in Ross-shire as the Red Priest of Applecross, cursed the deed in Latin and Gaelic, and predicted, that as Lachlan Mohr had built a house for the dowagers of his family to live in, not one should ever die there; and strange enough, though it had been inhabited for about two hundred years, no member of our family was ever known to pay the debt of nature within it; though many who were sick, ailing, or longing for death, after dwelling long there, perished by violent ends or sudden diseases elsewhere.
Angus Mac Innon, who fought at Culloden, left a widow, a daughter of Barcaldine, who attained a vast age, and lived beyond a century, attenuated, bed-ridden, sickly, and querulous, in the last stages of emaciation and second childhood. Longing for a crisis to her sufferings, in the same year in which her present Majesty ascended the throne, she insisted on being conveyed on a pallet into the open air, and, like the Lady May, of Cadboll, to defy fate, and test the truth of the terrible prediction. Four of our people, Alisdair Mac Gouran, Ian Mac Raonuil, Red Gillespie, and Mac Ian, the father of my fosterer, bore her slowly and carefully on a palliasse; and whether it might be the result of fancy acting on a highly-nervous temperament, or the weakness of a system worn away with age, I know not; but to the no small horror of her bearers, the aged widow of Angus expired at the instant she was passing the threshold.
Now, my mother had long been sickly and almost bedridden, and thus though I could scarcely put much faith in the prediction of the Red Priest of Applecross, which had been impressed upon me in childhood by my nurse, the mother of Callum Dhu, as something to be spoken of in whispers, and thought of with awe, yet I looked forward with vague apprehension to our expulsion from the house; as she was wont to affirm that she was so feeble and worn by time, that the life in her was not natural, and that if once she passed the door of the fated mansion, her doom would be similar to that of Angus' widow. A strange terror seized me with this thought, for my mother was my only tie to the glen, to my country—to existence itself!
Weary of dark conjectures, and with a heart full of dim forebodings, while Callum and Minnie were in another part of the house, I entered my mother's little parlour. She was again seated at a little tripod table, with her bible and her knitting before her.