“Come, come,” he went on, “will you dare tell me that the sheiling singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my ‘Harp of the Trees’? If there’s a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I’ve yet to learn it.”
“If I heard it,” said John, “I’ve forgotten it.”
“Name of God!” cried the bard in amaze, “you couldn’t; it goes so”—and he hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had been singing some years before.
We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain of it, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of his budget—some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knew by fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh—but to each and all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance.
“No doubt,” said he, “they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, but Argile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for a living but string rhymes?”
The bard was in a sweat of vexation. “I’ve wandered far,” said he, “and you beat all I met in a multitude of people. Do you think the stringing of rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the field and the wood between his duans?”
“I think,” said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestness was in his utterance)—“I think his songs would be all the better for some such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt the blood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at the pit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of a desolate home? Love,—sir, you are young, young———”
“Thanks be with you,” said the bard; “your last word gives me the clue to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made in my country could confer.”
I’m afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.
“John Lorn, John Lom!” I cried, “I heard a soldier sing your songs in the ship Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore.”