It was not, however, till we had got down Glenaora as far as Carnus that we found either kindness or conversation. In that pleasant huddle of small cothouses, the Macarthurs, aye a dour and buoyant race, were making up their homes again as fast as they could, inspired by the old philosophy that if an inscrutable God should level a poor man’s dwelling with the dust of the valley, he should even take the stroke with calmness and start to the building again. So the Macarthurs, some of them back from their flight before Antrim and Athole, were throng bearing stone from the river and turf from the brae, and setting up those homes of the poor, that have this advantage over the homes of the wealthy, that they are so easily replaced. In this same Carnus, in later years, I have made a meal that showed curiously the resource of its people. Hunting one day, I went to a little cothouse there and asked for something to eat A field of unreaped barley stood ripe and dry before the door. Out the housewife went and cut some straws of it, while her daughter shook cream in a bottle, chanting a churn-charm the while. The straw was burned to dry the grain, the breeze win’d it, the quern ground it, the fire cooked the bannocks of it Then a cow was milked, a couple of eggs were found in the loft, and I sat down in a marvellously short space of time to bread and butter, milk, eggs, and a little drop of spirits that was the only ready-made provand in the house. And though now they were divided between the making of coronachs and the building of their homes, they had still the art to pick a dinner, as it were, off the lichened stone.
There was one they called Niall Mor a Chamais (Big Neil of Karnes), who in his day won the applause of courts by slaying the Italian bully who bragged Scotland for power of thew, and I liked Niall Mor’s word to us as we proceeded on our way to Inneraora.
“Don’t think,” said he, “that MacCailein’s beat yet, or that the boar’s tusks are reaped from his jaw. I am of an older clan than Campbell, and closer on Diarmaid than Argile himself; but we are all under the one banner now, and I’ll tell you two gentlemen something. They may tear Castle Inneraora out at the roots, stable their horses in the yard of Kilmalieu, and tread real Argile in the clay, but well be even with them yet. I have an arm here” (and he held up a bloody-looking limb, hashed at Inverlochy); “I’ll build my home when this is mended, and i’ll challenge MacDonald till my mouth is gagged with the clod.”
“And they tell me your son is dead yonder,” I said, pitying the old man who had now no wife nor child.
“So they tell me,” said he; “that’s the will of God, and better a fast death on the field than a decline on the feather-bed. I’ll be weeping for my boy when I have bigged my house again and paid a call to some of his enemies.”
Niall Mot’s philosophy was very much that of all the people of the glen, such of them as were left. They busily built their homes and pondered, as they wrought, on the score to pay.
“That’s just like me,” M’Iver would say after speeches like that of Niall Mor. He was ever one who found of a sudden all another person’s traits in his own bosom when their existence was first manifested to him. “That’s just like me myself; we are a beaten clan (in a fashion), but we have our chief and many a thousand swords to the fore yet I declare to you I am quite cheery thinking we will be coming back again to those glens and mounts we have found so cruel because of our loneliness, and giving the MacDonalds and the rest of the duddy crew the sword in a double dose.”
“Ay, John,” said I, “it’s easy for you to be light-hearted in the matter. You may readily build your bachelor’s house at Barbreck, and I may set up again the barn at Elrigmore; but where husband or son is gone it’s a different story. For love is a passion stronger than hate. Are you not wondering that those good folk on either hand of us should not be so stricken that they would be sitting in ashes, weeping like Rachel?”
“We are a different stuff from the lady you mention,” he said; “I am aye thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, and scalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselves warm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation now and then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting to decay. The world’s well divided after all, and the happiness as well as the dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife nor child I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me, and they manage to make up their share of content with reflections upon the sweetness of revenge. There was never a man so poor and miserable in this world yet but he had his share of it, even if he had to seek it in the bottle. Amn’t I rather clever to think of it now? Have you heard of the idea in your classes?”
“It is a notion very antique,” I confessed, to his annoyance; “but it is always to your credit to have thought it out for yourself. It is a notion discredited here and there by people of judgment, but a very comfortable delusion (if it is one) for such as are well off, and would salve their consciences against the miseries of the poor and distressed. And perhaps, after all, you and the wise man of old are right; the lowest state—even the swineherd’s—may have as many compensations as that of his master the Earl. It is only sin, as my father would say, that keeps the soul in a welter———”