V.
THE WIFE OF THE RED COMYN.
MY GRANDFATHER'S STORY.
The old gentleman had served in the 42nd Highlanders, or old Black Watch, in early life, and could spin to us endless yarns of the bloody affair of Ticonderoga, where the regiment had no less than six hundred and forty-seven officers and soldiers killed or wounded; the expedition to the Lakes; the surrender of Montreal; the siege of the Moro, and the scalping, flaying alive, the tomahawking, and other little pleasantries incidental to the relief of Fort Pitt in 1763; and of that devilish business with the Red Indians amid the swamps and rocks at Bushy Run, all of which were "familiar in our mouths as household words;" while, to the venerable narrator, the smell of gunpowder, the flavour of Ferintosh, or the skirl of a bagpipe were like the elixir vitæ of the ancients, and seemed to renew his youth, strength, and spirit for a time; and thus the fire of other years would flash up within him, like the last gleam of a sinking lamp, as we sat by our bogwood fire in the long winter nights of the North.
In the year 1768, his regiment was cantoned in Galway, where it was reviewed by Major-General Armiger, and the old gentleman was wont to boast, that except two Lowland Scots, every soldier in its ranks was from the clans that dwell northward of the Tay, "and happily for the corps," he used to add, "these two were knocked on the head during the onfall at Long Island." The regiment, then for the third time in Ireland, remained there for seven years. During 1772, it was employed in suppressing tumults occasioned by the complicating interests and adverse views of the Catholic and Protestant landlords and tenants in Antrim and elsewhere; and in this delicate service their Highlanders were found particularly useful, from the knowledge of the language and their gentle bearing towards the people, whom by old tradition they believed to be sprung from the same stock as themselves. Though some of the Highland tribes have a proverb which says, cha b'ionann OBrien is na Gaël—that O'Brien and the Gael are not alike, yet they found many sympathies in common—to wit, a love of fun and breaking heads; a jealousy of the English; an aversion to still-hunting, and a just, laudable, and commendable antipathy to all gangers and tax-gatherers.
For the ticklish service of settling disputes in the neighbourhood of Antrim, it pleased his Majesty George III. to order that an additional company of the Black Watch should be raised among the Breadalbane Campbells; and it was soon seen, that though the slaughter of Ticonderoga had carried woe and desolation to many a lonely hearth and loving heart in the country of the clans, so far from extinguishing the military ardour of the Highland youth, it made them more than ever anxious to enrol themselves in the ranks of the Reicudan Dhu, for so was the regiment named, from the dark colours of its plumes and tartans, in contradistinction to the troops of the line, who wore scarlet coats, white waistcoats, pipeclayed breeches and flour-powdered wigs, with queues, pomatumed curls, and looped-up hats, having the true Blenheim cock and the star of Brunswick—i.e. the black leather cockade of the Protestant succession, which still survives on the chapeaux of the penny postman.
My grandfather was popular among the Breadalbane men, to please whom he had, at various times, hanged sundry MacNabs and Mac Alpines, whose ideas of the eighth commandment were somewhat vague; thus on being sent into "the marquis's country" to recruit, he raised the required company in three days, and marched down from the hills of Glen Urcbai with pipes playing, across the dreary Braes of Rannoch, and down by the Brig of Tay with a hundred of the handsomest men that ever became food for gunpowder, all clad in their native tartans, and well armed, each with his own sword, dirk and pistols, to which the Government added the usual arms and accoutrements of the line. From Perth, the captain was ordered to march his company to Glasgow, there to embark for Ireland; and proceeding en route, after leaving Falkirk and traversing the remains of the Torwood, he found himself, with his little command, approaching the burgh of Kirkintulloch one dreary November evening, just as the dusk was closing in, while the rain fell in torrents, and the wind swept in gusts through the pastoral hollows and hurled the wet and withered leaves furiously before it. There he was compelled to halt, and oblige the authorities to procure immediate quarters for a hundred Highlanders—a race of whom the westland Whigs had harboured a holy aversion and wholesome terror, since the epoch of the Great Montrose and his daredevil Cavaliers, one hundred and twenty years before.
"But what has all this to do with the Wife of the Red Comyn?" the reader may ask. I answer, everything—for had not my grandfather halted on that wet November night in the ancient burgh of Kirkintulloch, that good lady—though she made some noise in her time—had never been introduced to the reader's notice. So patience yet awhile.
The soldiers were soon distributed among the people by the town constable, and in a few minutes after seeing the last man off to his billet, my grandfather found himself standing before the gate of the Castle of Kirkintulloch drenched through plaid and philabeg, while the rain dripped gracefully from his long feathers into the nape of his neck, and the water spouted from his scabbard as from a syringe when he sheathed his claymore. Draggled and weary, he knocked furiously against the gate of the huge mansion, on which, as being the most important in the town, he was billeted as commander of the forces. Being a Celt, and not blessed with overmuch patience, he thrust his billet-order almost into the mouth of the servant who opened the door, and then swaggered in with all the air of a man who had heard the forty days' cannonade at the Moro; but a couple of good drams from a jolly magnum bonum of Ferintosh, which were given to him without delay, at once restored his equanimity, and, chucking the plump housekeeper under the chin, my grandfather—or, as I shall call him in future, the captain—proceeded upstairs.
This ancient Castle of Kirkintulloch, which had been stormed by Edward I. of England, but re-taken by the Scots, was a good specimen of the gloomy mansions of the Middle Ages, when every Scotsman was forced to keep watch and ward against his neighbour, and, more than all, against Southern invasion; for it was built by the Comyns, who flourished in the days of Malcolm III., and were Lords of Linton Roderick and of Badenoch, and who made a great figure during the reigns of the three Alexanders and Robert I.
In those turbulent times every Scotsman was a soldier, and a brave one, too; every house was a fortress, every fortress a citadel, and its inmates were a garrison, while the urgent necessity for security caused the Scottish baron literally to found his dwelling on a rock.