THIS Highland country is so peaceful and content, its folk are so staid
in welldoing, property is so safe, and the human passions—at least the
more savage of them—are kept so strictly in control, that most of us
forget how lately we rose from the rude condition of nature. It is
really but a brief span of years that separates us from our fathers who
slept with an ear to the heather, hunted in the forests for their very
lives, fought in stupid causes as heartily as we go football-playing, or
forayed over narrow borders into parts of the country distinguished from
their own but by a difference in the colour of the tartan. Who thinks of
the ancient cateran fire smouldering under a frock-coat, or would imagine
that the cry of “Cruachan!” in the ears of a quiet and prosperous
sheep-farmer at a country fair will sometimes splash deep in the wells of
his being, and stir up the red ghosts of war and vengeance that have not
walked for generations? I have seen that marvel often, though always
with new astonishment. I can amuse myself sometimes by saying one word
of great meaning to the members of a family that has not broken the law
since the year 1745, and see, in a moment, bitterness where before was
indifference, anger in the gentlest girls, and in their brothers a hate
almost as unreasoning and hot as that of Cain. A flash—just one flash of
the spirit that we do not control, but with no consent of the flesh—and
then they will laugh at their own folly.
It was some such flame of the ancient elemental passions, doubtless, that
accounted for the transgression of Macaulay, the factor of the Captain of
Kilree—an outbreak of the Islands that I think has had no parallel in the
annals of Scotland for more than a hundred years. I did not know
Macaulay in his prime. When I was a boy he was an ancient, bent, and
spiritless man, with a singularly devout reputation, and a grim,
humorsome Lowland wife; but everybody round the countryside knew his
story, and we boys used to look at him from afar off, amazed, admiring,
and half-incredulous, like children who have heard tales of giants who
could stride from hill to hill, and have at last been taken to see one in
a show. In his shabby green business suit of broadcloth and beaver hat,
or leaning on his cane at the church gate, with snuff strewn down his
waistcoat, there was nothing at all about his personality to suggest the
terrific and romantic. Maybe, as our elders used to say, the nose did
hint at the eagle, the flaring nostril say something of the morning
sniffed suspiciously among alders where the skulker hid, a certain twitch
of the bushy eyebrows express a fearful soul that one time stood alone on
hill-tops and saw the whole visible world its enemy; but to our vision,
at least, the man was “done,” as we say, and by his look might have been
a prosperous weaver in the decline of years.
Yet he had an experience, the narration of which by our elders gave him
the glory of Rob Roy to our imaginations. He had, in a sublime hour of
his life, burst the bonds that make some of us fret in the urging weather
of spring, that most of us chafe at in childhood, when the old savage
wakes and cries, but grow at last to tolerate and even cherish; and he
had taken the world for his pillow—as the Gaelic phrase goes—and short of
the vital blood of man had dipped in the early sins.