OF the half-dozen men of Mid-Argyll condemned on one account or another
for their part in the Rebellion, the last, and the least deserving of so
scurvy a fate, was young John Clerk of Pennymore. He had been out in the
affair more for the fun of the thing than from any high passion of
politics; he would have fought as readily for the Duke as for the Young
Pretender if the Duke had appealed to him first; he was a likeable lad to
all who knew him, and the apple of his mother’s eye.
The hanging of young John Clerk seemed at the time all the more harsh a
measure since he was not charged directly with rebellion, but with being
actor or art and part in the death of the Captain of Clonary, who was
shot on his way from Culloden by a gang of lurking Jacobites of whom the
lad was one, and maybe innocent. The murderers scattered to the mist and
to the sea. For six years Clerk sequestered in the land of France, and
was caught at last in a tender filial hour when he had ventured home to
see his folk. A squad of the Campbells found him skulking in the wood of
Pennymore on the very afternoon of his return; he had not even had the
time to see his people, and the trinkets and sweetmeats he had meant for
his mother were strewn from his pockets among the bracken as he was being
dragged before the Lords.
They looked at him—these dour and exigent gentlemen—with eyes that held
no pity, not men at all for the nonce, but bowelless, inexorable legal
mechanism; and Elchies, squeaking like a showman at a fair, sentenced him
to the gallows.
“John Clerk,” he said, “you have had an impartial trial; you have been
defended by an able advocate, who has made the most of a wretched cause;
the jury has found you guilty as libelled, and it only rests with this
court to pronounce sentence accordingly. You may yet, during the brief
period you have to live, best serve your country and your friends by
warning them against those pernicious principles which have brought you
to this untimely end, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!”
Then the doomster declared doom—that young John Clerk be handed over to
the Sheriff-Depute, hanged by the neck on the burgh gibbet at
Creag-nan-caoraich on the 5th September, and thereafter left for a time
in chains.
The lad made a bow to his judges, gave a last quick, eager glance about
the court to assure himself his parents were not there, and then he was
hurried down the trap-door to the cells.
* * * * *
There was still a month to go before the day of execution, and the Clerks
of Pennymore—the proud and bitter dame and her pious husband—scoured the
shire in search of sympathetic gentlemen of influence, and forswore sleep
itself in their efforts to secure reprieve. They seemed, poor souls!
miraculous in their great endurance, singly or together tramping here and
there on a quest no neighbour dared to share, tragic to see upon the
highway, horrible to hear at midnight when their cart went rumbling
through the sleeping clachans. Sympathy was plentiful, but influence was
shy, and the hopes of Pennymore were narrowed at last to Campbell of
Lochgair, a lawyer himself, with the ear of His Grace and the Crown
authorities.
Lochgair, more, as it strangely seemed, for the sake of the peevish dame
than for her husband’s, promised his active interest, and almost
guaranteed release, and in the latter days of August went to Edinburgh to
wait on the Lord Advocate, who was Prestongrange. It was the year of the
stunted corn—1752—and never in the memory of man had been such inclement
weather. The seas would seem to have forgotten the ways of peace; the
glens were flooded, and the Highlands for a space were cut off from the
Lowland world, and in a dreary privacy of storm. So the days passed—for
most folk as if Time itself were bogged among the mire—for the man and
wife in Pennymore as the flap of wings. They longed each evening for the
morrow since it might bring welcome news, and yet they grudged the night
and looked with terror on the dawn, since it brought the horrid hour a
vigil closer.
And there were no tidings from Lochgair!
“I might have known! I might have known!—a traitor ever, like his clan!”
cried the mother, all her patience drained to the bitter dregs, wringing
her hands till the blood came to the knuckles. “Lochgair will see the
laddie hanged, and never jee his beaver. Too well I know his promises!
We’re here forgot, the pair of us, and all the world sleeping sound, no
way put about at the thought of young John Clerk. Deserted of men!
deserted of men!” and her cry rose like a dirge in their lonely dwelling.
“But not of God and His grace,” said her husband, shrinking before the
fury of her eye. “I have trusted Lochgair in this with all my heart, and
he cannot betray us. He knows that his breath is all that lies between
our laddie and eternity.”
“Oh, trust!” she hissed. “I ken the man; but I have trusted too, this
fortnight, till my very heart is rent, yet God Himself cannot put off the
5th September.”
“Yea, even that, if it be His will; our times are in His hands,” said the
pious husband, and turned him again to his Bible. But the woman’s doubts
were justified, and on the morning of the day before their son should
perish, they yoked the horse and drove in the cart to the burgh town to
see him for the first time in the cell he had shared with some doomed
sheep-stealers.
Six miles lay between their home and the tolbooth gates, and yet it was
in pitch-black night they came to the confines of the burgh, for they
dreaded the pitying eyes of men and women. And all the way the woman
fondled something in her plaid. They saw, afar, and few, and melancholy,
wan lights in the burgh lands, blurred by the weeping rain; and at this
spectacle—which told them the world went on its ordinary way and thought
of breakfast, while their lad sat counting the hours, and they were
engaged with misery—the man put his hand on the woman’s shoulder with a
grip of steel, and she gave the last sob that was ever heard from her.
For ever after she was a woman made of stone. The horse, as if it shared
their feeling, stopped on the highway, reared itself in terror of
something unseen, and snapped its belly-band, and the cart stood still
under heaving beeches whose windy branches filled the dark with noise and
cried down the very waves which roared on Creag-nan-caoraich.
The man jumped from the cart and fumbled with the harness, to find that
further progress, wanting a girth, was not to be contemplated.
“I will walk into the town,” he said, “and get a rope, if you sit here
till I return. You will not mind my leaving you, Margaret?”
“Mind!” she exclaimed with bitterness; “I have learned my lesson, and
there is no more to mind.” But she fondled the thing concealed in her
plaid, and her man walked quickly towards the wan lights of the
tenements, leaving her all alone.
For a moment only she heard his footsteps, the sound of them soon lost in
the din of nature—the uproar of the forest trees, whose ponderous
branches creaked; the wind, canorous, blowing between the mountains; the
booming crepitation of the sea upon the rocks. And yet no sense of
solitude depressed her, for her mind was occupied by one triumphant
thought—that young John Clerk should at least be spared the horror and
shame of a public execution.
She had drawn, at first, the drenched plaid over her head to shield her
and shut her in from the noise of tempest; but her hands in a little
while were so busily engaged with her secret possession that the tartan
screen at last rolled back on her shoulders, and she was aware of another
sound than those of nature—the near, faint clang of chains. It was
scarcely audible, but unmistakable—the beat of a loose end of iron links
against wood, somewhere above her head, as she sat in the cart by the
side of Creag-nan-caoraich. She stared up into the darkness and saw
nothing, then stood to her feet and felt above her with trembling hand.
Her fingers searched along a beam with a rope attached to it, whose
meaning flooded to her brain with a gush that stunned; she touched a dead
man’s feet! and the pitiless clouds that had swept all night across the
heavens heaved for a moment from the face of the reeling moon, and she
saw the wretch upon the gibbet!
“My son! my son!” she screamed till the rocks and trees gave back the
echo, and yet the distant lights of the burgh town glowed on with
unconcern.
* * * * *
Her cries had ceased; she was sunk in a listless torpor in the bottom of
the cart when her man returned in a state as wretched as her own, running
with stumbling feet along the rutted highway.
“My God! my God!” said he, “I have learned of something dreadful!”
“I have learned it for myself,” said his wife. “You’re a day behind the
fair.”
“Not one day, but eleven of them,” said her husband, hardly taking her
meaning. “It is the fifteenth of September, and I’m so fearful of the
worst. I dared not rap at a door in the town and ask.”
“The fifteenth of September,” she repeated dully; “we have not slept so
sound this month back that we could miss a fortnight. Have you lost your
reason?”
“I have seen a placard put up on the mercat cross,” said her husband,
with his brow upon the horse’s back. “I read it in the light of the
tolbooth windows, and it tells that the Government have decreed that, the
day after September 2nd should be September 14th. Eleven days are
dropped; it is called—it is called the Gregorian Calendar, and I have
forgotten about the rope.”
The woman harshly laughed.
“Are you hearing me, Margaret?” he cried, putting up his arms to seize
her, feeling some fresh terror.
“Gregorian here, Gregorian there!” she exclaimed. “Whose Calendar but
the cursed Campbells’, who have bonnily diddled me of my son! Our times
are in God’s hands, you said; you are witness now they are in the
devil’s!”
“But it may be I was right, and that this is our Father’s miracle; John
could not be—could not die but on the day appointed, and no such day, it
seems, was on the Calendar. But I dared not ask, I dared not ask; I was
dumfounded and ran to you, and here I am even without the rope.”
Again the woman harshly laughed.
“You need not fash about the rope, good-man,” said she; “at your very
hand is plenty for your purpose, for there my son is, young John Clerk,
and he hangs upon the tree.”
The woman would not put a hand upon the body. Without her aid her
husband lowered the burden from the gibbet, laid it in the cart and
covered it with his plaid; and when a girth for the horse had been
improvised from a part of the shameful halter, the two of them turned for
home, walking side by side through the dawn that now was coming, slow and
ashen, to the east.
The man was dumb, and walked without volition, wrestling with satanic
doubts of a Holy Purpose that had robbed him of his son with such
unnecessary and ghastly mockery; the woman cuddled her cold secret in her
bosom, stared glassily at the coming day, and for a time let fury and
despair whirl through her brain like poison vapours.
“I will never rest,” she cried at last, “till Lochgair has paid the
penalty for this trick upon us. My laddie’s death is at his door!”
Her man said nothing, leading the horse.
“At his door!” she cried more vehemently. “Are you hearing me? He has
slain my son in this shameful way as surely as if he had tied the rope
himself.”
Her husband made no answer; he found in her words but the thought of one
for the time demented, and he walked appalled at the chaos into which the
precious edifice of his faith had tumbled. Rudely she plucked his arm
and screamed in his ear—
“What will you do to Campbell?”
“To Campbell?” he repeated vaguely. “God forgive him his false hopes and
negligence, but it was not he who condemned our son.”
“But for him,” said the woman, “my son would have died like a gentleman,
and not like a common thief.”
“I do not understand,” said her husband blankly.
“No, you never understand,” she sneered, “that was ever your failing. Do
you think that if I had not the promise of Lochgair, I should let my
laddie die upon the gallows? The first of his race! the first of his
race! I had brought with me his pistol that he might save himself the
scandal of the doomster’s hand,” and she took the weapon from her bosom.
Her husband looked at it, grasped at once the Spartan spirit of her
scheme, and swithered between chagrin that it had been foiled, and shame
that the sin of self-slaughter should for a moment seem desirable.
“Oh, Margaret!” he cried, “you terrify me. Throw that dreadful weapon in
the sea,” and he made to take it from her, but she restored it to her
plaid.
“No, no,” she cried, “there may be use for it—”
“Use for it!” he repeated, and she poured into his ear the torrent of her
hatred of Lochgair. “He could have won my laddie off,” she said; “we had
his own assurance. And if we had not put our trust in him, we would have
gone to others—Asknish or Stonefield, or the Duke himself—the Duke would
have had some pity on a mother.”
“Lochgair may have sore deceived us,” said her husband, “yet he was but
an instrument; our laddie’s doom was a thing appointed from the start of
Time.”
“Then from the start of Time you were doomed to slay Lochgair.”
“What! I?” quo’ he,
“One or other of us. We are, it seems by your religion, all in the hands
of fate and cannot help ourselves. Stand up like a man to this filthy
Campbell, and give him the bullet that was meant for a better man.”
“You are mad, goodwife,” said her husband; “I would shed no man’s blood.”
“I speak not of men,” said she, “but of that false fiend Lochgair who has
kept us on the rack, and robbed Time itself of a fortnight to make his
clan diversion. Oh, man! man! are you a coward? Challenge him to the
moor; remember that at the worst my son who lies in the cart there could
have died in decency and not at the doomster’s hand if Lochgair had not
misled us—”
“Woman!” cried her husband, “get behind me!” and took refuge in a gust of
mumbled prayer.
They were now upon the Kenmore shore where the sea came deep against the
rocks; no living soul had met them on their passage down the coast with
their disgraceful burden, and alarmed at the prospect of encounter with
any curious wayfarer, they drew the cart behind a thicket, to let an
approaching horseman pass without his observation. Far off they heard
the clatter of his horse’s hoofs, and while yet he was a good way distant
the questing eye of the woman saw he wore a beaver hat, and a familiar
coat with silver buttons!
“Look! look!” she cried, “here comes the very man, delivered to our
hands.”
“I will not touch him! I will not touch him!” said her husband, cowering
behind the bushes.
“Then will I!” said she, and drew the pistol from her breast, and her
husband wrestled with her for the weapon.
Lochgair in a furious haste came galloping, his vision engaged on the
road before him, and would have swept on his way unnoticing the cart, its
burden, or attendants, but for the altercation in the thicket. He
checked his horse, turned round on the saddle, and peered among the
branches, where the husband, breathing hard, had got possession of the
weapon.
“He has slain my son, but I will spare him,” said the husband, and the
woman put her mouth against his ear.
“No son of yours,” she whispered, “that is the curse of it!—but his own!”
“My God!” cried her husband, and fired at the horseman’s breast. He fell
like a sack of oats on the roadway, and his horse flew off among the
brackens.
For a while the world seemed in a swound. In a swound the waves lapped
up against the rocks; in a swound the leafage moved; in a swound the
sea-birds cried, and the man and woman, desperate, sought to hide the
evidence of their crime. They turned the dead man over on his back,
emptied his pouches, filled his clothes with stones, then threw him, with
the pistol, in the sea.
“Home! home!” the wife commanded, placing the dead man’s papers in her
plaid, and she walked, without remorse, by the side of her whimpering
man, to Pennymore. She stirred the embers of the fire, and one by one
destroyed the dead man’s documents, until the very last, and that she
glanced at horror-stricken, for it was her son’s reprieve!
With a scream she rushed outside and turned her husband’s plaid from the
face of the dead man in the cart—and it was not young John Clerk!