“I have you now!” he cried; “it’s to show the situation of the sun when they left the rendezvous. Three o’clock, and no mist with them; good lad, good lad! Well, we must be going. And now that we’re on the safe side of Argile there’s only one thing vexing me, that we might have been here and all together half a day ago if yon whelp of a whey-faced MacDonald in the bed had been less of the fox.”
“Indeed and he might have been,” said I, as we pursued our way. “A common feeling of gratitude for the silver——”
“Gratitude!” cried John, “say no more; you have fathomed the cause of his bitterness at the first trial. If I had been a boy in a bed myself, and some reckless soldiery of a foreign clan, out of a Sassenach notion of decency, insulted my mother and my home with a covert gift of coin to pay for a night’s lodging, I would throw it in their faces and follow it up with stones.”
Refreshed by our rest and heartened by our meal, we took to the drove-road almost with lightness, and walked through the evening till the moon, the same that gleamed on Loch Linnhe and Lochiel, and lighted Argile to the doom of his reputation for the time being, swept a path of gold upon Lochow, still hampered with broken ice. The air was still, there was no snow, and at Corryghoil, the first house of any dignity we came to, we went up and stayed with the tenant till the morning. And there we learned that the minister and the three Campbells and Stewart, the last with a bullet in his shoulder, had passed through early in the afternoon on their way to Cladich.
CHAPTER XXIX.—THE RETURN.
We got a cold welcome from the women of our own clan and country. They had been very warm and flattering as we passed north—the best they had was not good enough for us; now they eyed us askance as we went among them in the morning. Glenurchy at its foot was wailing with one loud unceasing coronach made up of many lamentations, for no poor croft, no keep, no steading in all the countryside almost, but had lost its man at Inverlochy. It was terrible to hear those sounds and see those sights of frantic women setting every thought of life aside to give themselves wholly to their epitaphs for the men who would come no more.
For ordinary our women keen but when they are up in years and without the flowers of the cheek that the salt tear renders ugly; women who have had good practice with grief, who are so far off from the fore-world of childhood where heaven is about the dubs of the door that they find something of a dismal pleasure in making wails for a penny or two or a cogie of soldier’s brose. They would as soon be weeping as singing; have you not seen them hurrying to the hut to coronach upon a corpse, with the eager step of girls going to the last dance of the harvest? Beldames, witches, I hate your dirges, that are but an old custom of lamentation! But Glenurchy and Lochow to-day depended for their sorrow upon no hired mourners, upon no aged play-actors at the passion of grief; cherry-cheeked maidens wept as copiously as their grand-dames, and so this universal coronach that rose and fell on the wind round by Stronmealchan and Inish-trynich, and even out upon the little isles that snuggle in the shadow of Cruachan Ben, had many an unaccustomed note; many a cry of anguish from the deepest well of sorrow came to the ear. To walk by a lake and hear griefs chant upon neighbouring isles is the chief of the Hundred Dolours. Of itself it was enough to make us melancholy and bitter, but it was worse to see in the faces of old women and men who passed us surly on the road, the grudge that we had been spared, we gentlemen in the relics of fine garments, while their own lads had been taken. It was half envy that we, and not their own, still lived, and half anger that we had been useless in preventing the slaughter of their kinsmen. As we walked in their averted or surly looks, we had no heart to resent them, for was it not human nature? Even when a very old crooked man with a beard like the foam of the linn, and eyes worn deep in their black sockets by constant staring upon care, and through the black mystery of life, stood at his door among his wailing daughters, and added to his rhyming a scurrilous verse whereof we were the subjects, we did no more than hurry our pace.
By the irony of nature it was a day bright and sunny; the londubh parted his beak of gold and warbled flutey from the grove, indifferent to all this sorrow of the human world. Only in far-up gashes of the hills was there any remnant of the snow we had seen cover the country like a cloak but a few days before. The crows moved briskly about in the trees of Cladich, and in roupy voices said it might be February of the full dykes but surely winter was over and gone. Lucky birds! they were sure enough of their meals among the soft soil that now followed the frost in the fields and gardens; but the cotters, when their new grief was weary, would find it hard to secure a dinner in all the country once so well provided with herds and hunters, now reft of both.
I was sick of this most doleful expedition; M’Iver was no less, but he mingled his pity for the wretches about us with a shrewd care for the first chance of helping some of them. It came to him unexpectedly in a dark corner of the way through Cladich wood, where a yeld hind lay with a broken leg at the foot of a creag or rock upon which it must have stumbled. Up he hurried, and despatched and gralloched it with his sgian dubh in a twinkling, and then he ran back to a cot where women and children half craved us as we passed, and took some of them up to this lucky find and divided the spoil It was a thin beast, a prey no doubt to the inclement weather, with ivy and acorn, its last meal, still in its paunch.