I had much to reflect on, and above all the flood of bitter and anxious thoughts that rolled like a dark and tempestuous sea around me, I saw the image of Laura Everingham; for, boy like, and full of mountain poetry, legendary lore, and old enthusiasm, to me she naturally became a goddess, and the guiding-star of all my hopes and aspirations; while serving to temper with something of reason the fiery anger with which I was tempted to regard the cruelty and harshness of her father; who, like too many of our new Highland proprietors, was but the slave of mammon and the tool of a cunning factor.
While threading my way—somewhat hastily I confess—through a deep and savage cairn, which was terrible of old as the shade of a mysterious spirit—a rushing sound, a crashing of branches struck my ear, and something white passed near me, like a sunbeam, or a flash of fire.
'The white stag!' I exclaimed, in a breathless voice, and involuntarily grasped my dirk, while the perspiration started to my brow; for by an old tradition in the glen, it was affirmed, that whenever danger was near the race of Mac Innon, a white stag crossed the Braes of Loch Ora.
'My mother! my mother!' was my next thought, and like a mountain deer, I sprang away to reach the old jointure-house of our family.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DEATH.
Dawn was stealing across the dun slopes of Ben Ora and the grey rocky scalps of the Craig-na-tuirc, when I reached the crest of a hill which overhung my mother's residence; and there I paused to draw breath, and to survey a scene which, though familiar to me as the features of my own face, never lost the charm of its lonely beauty.
Diminished by distance, the little thatched cottages in the glen seemed less than molehills, but green and silent, dotting the slope far down below, while above them rose the stupendous mountains piled up, crest on crest, to heaven. From the humble roofs, the smoke was beginning to ascend in long spiral columns into the clear and ambient air, as the poor, but thrifty housewives of the glen prepared their fires of guisse-monaye—the bogwood and black peat.
In this vast Highland solitude where I paused the breeze bore to the ear no sound of domestic life; no sheep bleated, as of old, on the green hill side; no horse neighed or cow lowed in the ample glen beneath, for the poor cottagers had long since parted with all for sustenance; but there rang the ceaseless rush of the torrent, which plashed and glittered as it tore through the corrie; the whirr of the plover, the hum of the heather-bee, or the distant roar of the rutting hind, as he rose from his dewy lair among the feathery bracken beside yonder old grey battle-cairn. Even these sounds were faint or undefined, and all nature seemed as motionless and still, as the stately stag with giant horns, that stood on a pinnacle of rock, against the rosy flush of the eastern sky. He seemed to be surveying the scene; then he moved his lofty antlers, and lo! between me and the gorgeous blaze of light that overspread the east, and threw out in black relief the sharp jagged outline of the rocky hill, there rose a forest of branching antlers, as, in obedience to their king, a noble herd of deer, calves, hinds, and harts, three thousand head and more, stood for a minute as if to show their whole array, and then with slow and measured steps, descended and wound down the mountain side, until they disappeared among the sandy ravines and bushy corries which the streams and storms of ages have torn and riven in the bosom of Ben Ora.
There had been a great stalking expedition in the forests of the West, and the gillies of the Marquis of Drumalbane had been driving the deer for many miles along the shore; hence the collection of this vast herd, but amidst its masses I could discern no trace of a white stag. Then, whence the vision of last night? Was this animal indeed supernatural, and the harbinger of evil, as tradition affirmed it to be?