Little Coll MacGregor, then Rob's only child, was held up for his father to kiss. "Now, fare-ye-well, Bird Helen," said he; "ere we return, I will have laid the wolf's head on the heather;" and with his followers, he left the hamlet at a quick pace.
The wife of Rob Roy looked after them for a moment, as their tartans waved, and their bright arms flashed in the moonlight; then her eye glanced down the glen, where the burn wound in silver sheen towards Loch Lomond, and with a single pious hope for her husband's safety, she quietly shut the door, which was well secured by triple locks and bars of iron, and which had, moreover, two loopholes on each side, to fire muskets through. When not required for defence, these apertures were closed within, by a plug of wood. To her, the daughter of a proscribed race, the wife of a levier of black-mail, reared as she had been in the land of swordsmen, among fierce and predatory clans, the departure of her husband on such a mission was not a matter for much anxiety, and yet this pursuit of the MacRaes was the first important exploit of Rob Roy which appears in history.
CHAPTER V.
THE RED MACGREGOR.
"History," says a noble author, "is a romance which is believed; romance, a history which is not believed." Hence so much that is fabulous surrounds the name of Rob Roy, that, like Macbeth, his real history and character become almost lost; but I shall endeavour to tell the reader who and what he actually was. Rob Roy MacGregor, otherwise compelled by law (for reasons which shall be given elsewhere) to call himself Campbell, was in his twenty-fifth year at the time our story opens.
He was the second son of Lieutenant-Colonel Donald MacGregor, of Glengyle, in Perthshire, who commanded a regiment of infantry in the Scottish army of King James II. of England and VII. of Scotland. His mother was a daughter of Campbell of Glenfalloch, a powerful Highland chieftain, nearly related to the House of Breadalbane; consequently his birth was neither obscure nor ignoble. His elder brother was named John, and he had two sisters. His patrimony was the small estate of Inversnaid, near the head of Loch Lomond, and, through his mother, he had a right to a wild territory of rock and forest, named Craig-Royston, on the eastern shore of that beautiful loch, under the shadow of vast mountains; but, in virtue of the arbitrary Act of the Scottish Parliament, which abolished the name of MacGregor, he was always designated, in legal documents, Robert Campbell, of Inversnaid.
After the bloody clan-battle of Glenfruin, which led to the proscription of the whole of his surname, "few of the MacGregors were permitted to die a natural death," says the historian of the clan.* "As an inducement to murder, a reward was given for every head of a MacGregor that was conveyed to Edinburgh, and presented to the Council; and those who died a natural death were interred by their friends, quietly and expeditiously, as even the receptacles of the dead were not held sacred. When the grave of a MacGregor was discovered, it was common for the villains employed in this trade of slaughter, to dig him up, and mutilate the remains, by cutting off the head, to be sold to the Government, which seemed to delight in such traffic."
* Dr. MacLeay.
The historian proceeds to narrate that the chief purveyor of such goods was a certain petty Laird of Glenlochy, named Duncan Campbell, but more usually known as Duncan nan Cean—i.e., "of the heads."
It chanced one night that Lieutenant-Colonel MacGregor (the father of Rob Roy), accompanied by three soldiers of his surname, was passing near the ruins of the old castle of Cardross (wherein Robert Bruce breathed his last, and which were then visible, a little to the westward of the Leven, in Dumbartonshire), when, in a narrow pathway, they met a man leading a horse, on each side of which a pannier was swung.