“I’m glad it suits you,” said M’Iver. “I’ve seen the like before, and I’m not so sure about the advantage of it.”
CHAPTER XXIV.—A NIGHT’S SHELTER.
The rain that was a smirr or drizzle on the north side of Glencoe grew to a steady shower in the valley itself, and when we had traversed a bit in the airt of Tynree it had become a pouring torrent—slanting in our faces with the lash of whips, streaming from the hair and crinkling the hands, and leaving the bonnet on the head as heavy as any French soldier’s salade. I am no great unlover of a storm in the right circumstances. There is a long strath between Nordlingen and Donauworth of Bavaria, where once we amazed our foreign allies by setting out, bare to the kilt and sark, in threshing hail, running for miles in the pelt of it out of the sheer content of encounter—and perhaps a flagon or two of wine. It was a bravado, perhaps, but a ploy to brace the spirit; we gathered from it some of the virtues of our simple but ample elders, who were strong men when they lay asleep with a cheek to the naked earth and held their faces frankly up to sun or rain. But if we rejoiced in the rains of Bavaria, there was no cause for glee in those torrents of Glencoe, for they made our passage through the country more difficult and more dangerous than it was before. The snow on the ground was for hours a slushy compost, that the foot slipped on at every step, or that filled the brogue with a paste that nipped like brine. And when the melting snow ran to lower levels, the soil itself, relaxing the rigour of its frost, became as soft as butter and as unstable to the foot The bums filled to the lip and brawled over, new waters sprung up among the rocks and ran across our path, so that we were for ever wading and slipping and splashing and stumbling on a route that seemed never to come to any end or betterment.
Seven more pitiful men never trod Highlands. The first smirr soaked our clothing; by the middle of the glen we were drenched to the hide, and the rain was flowing from the edges of our kilts in runnels. Thus heaven scourged us with waters till about the hour of noon, when she alternated water with wind and gales burst from the west, the profound gorges of Stob Dubh belching full to the throat with animus. There were fir-plantings by the way, whose branches twanged and boomed in those terrific blasts, that on the bare brae-side lifted up the snow with an invisible scoop and flung it in our faces.
Stewart and the man with the want led the way, the latter ever with his eyes red a-weeping, looking about him with starts and tremors, moaning lamentably at every wail of wind, but pausing, now and then, to gnaw a bone he had had enough of a thief s wit to pouch in the house of the blind widow. Stewart, a lean wiry man, covered the way with a shepherd’s long stride-heel and toe and the last spring from the knee-most poverty-struck and mean in a kilt that flapped too low on his leg and was frayed to ribbons, a man with but one wish in the world, to save his own unworthy skin, even if every one else of our distressed corps found a sodden and abominable death in the swamps or rocks of that doleful valley. Then on the rear behind those commoners came the minister and John Splendid and myself, the minister with his breeks burst at the knees, his stockings caught up with a poor show of trimncss by a braid of rushes, contrived by M’Iver, and his coat-skirts streaming behind him. You could not but respect the man’s courage: many a soldier I’ve seen on the dour hard leagues of Germanie—good soldiers too, heart and body—-collapse under hardships less severe. Gordon, with a drawn and curd-white face, and eyes burning like lamps, surrendered his body to his spirit, and it bore him as in a dream through wind and water, over moor and rock, and amid the woods that now and again we had to hide in.
That we had to hide so little was one of the miracles of our traverse. At any other time perhaps Glencoe and the regions round about it would be as well tenanted as any low-country strath, for it abounded on either hand with townships, with crofts that perched on brief plateaux, here and there with black bothy-houses such as are (they say) the common dwellings over all the Hebrid Isles. Yet, moving, not in the ultimate hollow of the valley, but in fighting fashion upon the upper levels, we were out of the way of molestation, and in any case it was a valley for the time deserted of men. Women we could see in plenty, drawing water or bearing peats in from the bogs behind their dwellings, or crossing from house to house or toun to toun, with plaids drawn tightly over their heads, their bodies bent to meet the blasts that made their clothing banner and full. Nor children either were there in that most barren country, or they kept within, sheltering the storms assailing, and the want of them (for I have ever loved the little ones) added twenty-fold to my abhorrence of the place.
We had to hide but rarely, I say: two or three times when down in the valley’s depths there showed a small group of men who were going in the same direction as ourselves by the more natural route, at a quarter of a league’s distance in advance of us. They were moving with more speed than we, and for a time we had the notion that they might be survivors, like ourselves, of Argile’s clan. But at last this fancy was set at flight by the openness of their march, as well as by their stoppage at several houses by the way, from which they seemed to be joined by other men, who swelled their numbers so that after a time there would be over a score of them on the mission, whatever it might be. In that misty rain-swept day the eye could not carry far, and no doubt they were plainer to our view than we were to theirs among the drab vapours of the hillside. But once or twice we thought they perceived us, for they stopped and looked to the left and up the brae-face we were on, and then it was we had to seek the shelter of tree or bush. If they saw us, they seemed to suspect no evil, for they held on their way, still ahead of us, and making for Tynree. Whoever they were, they became at last so manifest a danger to our escape out of the head of the glen that we fell back anew on the first plan of going through the corries on the south side of the glen and piercing by them to Dalness. In the obscurity of a great shower that set up a screen between us and the company marching to Tynree, we darted down the brae, across the valley, and over to the passage they call the Lairig Eilde, that is on the west of the great Little Herd hill of Etive, and between it and Ben Fhada or the Long Mount, whose peaks you will find with snow in their gullies in the height of summer.
It was with almost a jocund heart I turned my back on Glencoe as we took a drove-path up from the river. But I glanced with a shiver down its terrible distance upon that nightmare of gulf and eminence, of gash, and peaks afloat upon swirling mists. It lay, a looming terror, forgotten of heaven and unfriendly to man (as one might readily imagine), haunted for ever with wailing airs and rumours, ghosts calling in the deeps of dusk and melancholy, legends of horror and remorse.
“Thank God,” said I, as we gave the last look at it—“thank God I was not born and bred yonder. Those hills would crush my heart against my very ribs.”