CHAPTER XXVII.—A TAVERN IN THE WILDS.
Tynree is the Gaelic of a name that in the English is King’s House. What humour gave so gaudy a title to so humble a place I have been always beat to know. For if the poorest of the chiefs of the poor isles had his choice of the gallows at once or Tynree for a long habitation, I’m thinking he would cry, “Out with your rope.” Standing all its lee lone on the edge of the wildest moor of all the Scottish kingdom, blustered on by the winds of Glen-coe and Glen Etive, the house, far apart from any other (even a hunter’s bothy among the corries), must be eerie, empty of all but its owner at most seasons of the year. He will have nothing about him but the flying plover that is so heart-breaking in its piping at the grey of morn, for him must the night be a dreariness no rowth of cruisie or candle may mitigate. I can fancy him looking out day after day upon plains of snow and cruel summits, blanching and snarling under sodden skies, and him wishing that God so good was less careless, and had given him a home and trade back among the cosy little glens, if not in the romping towns. But they tell me—people who rove and have tried Tynree in all weathers—that often it is cheerful with song and story; and there is a tale that once upon a time a little king, out adventuring in the kingly ways of winter stories, found this tavern in the wilds so warm, so hospitable, so resounding with the songs of good fellows, that he bided as a duc for a week of the winter weather.
When I came on Tynree, it was sounding with music, just, it might be, as in the day of the king in the story. Three of the morning, yet the hostel sent out a most hearty reek and firelight, the odours of stewing meats and of strong waters, and the sound of piping and trumping and laughing.
I stood back a piece from the house and debated with myself whether or not it was one where the tartan of Diarmaid would be sure of a welcome even if his sporran jingled with gold to the very jaws. All I wanted was shelter till the day broke and-this may seem odd to any one who has not known the utter wearisomeness of being a hunted man jinking in the dark among woods and alleys—the easy conversation of some human beings with no thought bothering them but what would be for the next meal, or the price of cattle at a town tryst And song and trump-come, I’ll tell the G—s own truth upon that! They called me Sobersides in those days: Miver gave me the name and kept it on me lili the very last, and yet sobriety of spirit (in one way) was the last quality in those oh! days of no grace to find in my nature. I liknl to sit in taverns, drinking not deeply, but enough to keep the mood from flagging, with people of the young heart, people fond of each other, adrift from all commercial cunning, singing old staves and letting their fancy go free to a tunc twanged on a Jew’s-tnimp or squeezed upon a lagulie or rigged upon a fiddle. So the merriment of I’ynree held me like a charm, and a mad whin last seized me, and in I went, confident that my insttn of comradery would not deceive me, and that at last I hail the boon-companion’s chance.
Its company never even stopped their clamour to look at me; the landlord put a jug at my elbow, and a whang of bread and cheese, and I was joining with an affected gusto in a chorus less than ten minutes after I had been a hunted man on the edge of Moor Ran No ready to toss up a bawbee to learn whither my road should be.
It was an orra and remarkable gathering, convened surely by the trickery of a fantastic and vagabond providence,—“not a great many, but well picked,” as Mac-gregor the Mottled said of his band of thieves. There were men and women to the number of a score, two or three travelling merchants (as they called themselves, but I think in my mind they were the kind of merchants who bargain with the dead corp on the abandoned battle-field, or follow expeditions of war to glean the spoil from burning homesteads); there were several gangrels, an Irishman with a silver eye, a strolling piper with poor skill of his noble instrument, the fiddler who was a drunken native of the place, a gipsy and his wife and some randy women who had dropped out of the march of Montrose’s troops. Over this notable congregation presided the man of the house—none of your fat and genial-looking gentlemen, but a long lean personage with a lack-lustre eye. You would swear he would dampen the joy of a penny wedding, and yet (such a deceit is the countenance) he was a person of the finest wit and humour, otherwise I daresay Tynree had no such wonderful party in it that night.
I sat by the fire-end and quaffed my ale, no one saying more to me for a little than “There you are!” Well enough they knew my side in the issue—my tartan would tell them that—but wandering bodies have no politics beyond the conviction that the world owes them as easy a living as they can cheat it out of, and they never mentioned war. The landlord’s dram was on, and ‘twas it I had shared in, and when it was over I pulled out a crown and bought the heartiest goodwill of a score of rogues with some flagons of ale.
A beetle-browed chamber, long, narrow, stifling with the heat of a great fire, its flagged floor at intervals would slap with bare or bauchled feet dancing to a short reel. First one gangrel would sing a verse or two of a Lowland ballant, not very much put out in its sentiment by the presence of the random ladies; then another would pluck a tune upon the Jew’s-trump, a chorus would rise like a sudden gust of wind, a jig would shake upon the fiddle. I never saw a more happy crew, nor yet one that—judging from the doctrine that thrift and sobriety have their just reward—deserved it less. I thought of poor Master Gordon somewhere dead or alive in or about Dalness, a very pupil of Christ, and yet with a share of His sorrows, with nowhere to lay his head, but it did not bitter me to my company.
By-and-by the landlord came cannily up to me and whispered in my ear a sort of apology for the rabble of his house.