HAWKE HOLCROFT.
The process of creeping in serpent fashion over sharp-pointed
heather, rough stones, and occasionally in the bed of a mountain
stream, as we have already described, proved intensely tiresome and
distasteful to a 'man about town' like Mr. Hawke Holcroft, who could
not entirely conceal his genuine disgust thereat, and at the slowness
of the whole affair, though reminded by Dugald's son Angus, a smart
young under-keeper, of the big hart of Benmore, which was stalked for
seven long summer days before it was killed.
'But, for the Lord's sake, sir, keep quiet,' whispered Angus. 'We
are now close on one of the finest of Macgilony's dun cows.'
'I see no dun cow!' grumbled Holcroft.
'He means yonder deer,' whispered Cameron, a fair-haired and
pleasant-looking fellow. 'Macgilony was a famous hunter in the olden
time, and his dun cows, as he called them, were the red deer of the
Grampians.'
But to Holcroft, whose idea of hunting the stag was to have a scared
and bewildered creature--a fallow deer, fed on oats and hay,
perhaps--cast loose from a game-cart in a smooth, grassy park, the
perseverance, courage, and labour required for stalking in the
Highlands seemed a simple waste of time and an inconceivable bore.
'Stop for a minute,' whispered Angus, as they crept _up the wind_;
'the stag can smell with more than its nostrils.'
As the stoppage took place directly in the bed of a brawling burn,
where they all lay on their stomachs, Holcroft not unnaturally asked,
with no small irritation, what he meant; and the wiry young
Highlander, who was whiskered and moustached to such an extent that,
with his shaggy eyebrows, he somewhat resembled a Skye terrier in
visage, explained his theory--no uncommon one, though, of course, not
admitted by naturalists--that the red deer can both smell and breathe
through the curious aperture beneath each eye, even if their heads
are immersed in water when in the act of drinking.
'Dioul!' muttered Angus, as they crept forward again, but on dry
heather this time, 'we can't be too cautious, whateffer! A deer's
eye is as keen as an eagle's, and his nose acute as that of a
foumart.'
'The first shot shall be yours, Holcroft,' said Cameron. 'I shall
reserve my fire. He seems a powerful animal, and, if you only wound
him, we may have the devil to pay!'
'Thanks--but how?' whispered Holcroft.
'If the dogs bring him to bay, he may turn upon us ere another
cartridge can be dropped in the barrel, and gore deep with his horns.'
English sportsmen generally prefer having the deer driven to stalking
them, for the bodily exertion requisite in the latter case tries so
severely every muscle and sinew; but, to the true Highland hunter,
one deer shot after a long and adventurous stalk, is worth a hundred
knocked over after a successful drive by gillies, when the herd is
urged in wild confusion through some narrow pass well garrisoned by
breech-loaders in secure ambush.
While Holcroft and Cameron crept softly forward nearer the browsing
deer, the young keeper threw his plaid over the eyes of the staghound
Shiuloch, and held it in by main strength, though his wrist was
nearly dislocated by the strain of the leash, and the ill-suppressed
whimpers of the animal were lost amid its muffling.
'Now,' whispered Angus, hoarsely, full of excitement--'now is your
time, sir!'
Holcroft took a long aim; in his intense anxiety, and perhaps
inspired by vanity, he overdid his aim; he fired at the precise
moment Allan's shot was heard in the distant corrie, but only wounded
the stag in the shoulder, and, just as he let fly the contents of the
other barrel (and missed), it fled away with the speed of the wind,
followed by the swift and powerful hound, which, quick as thought,
Angus let slip, and both vanished down a deep glen, overhung by
silver birches, close by.
'_Ohone a Dhia!_ but he has missed it, after all--it is no use
guiding a Sassenach whateffer!' muttered Angus, under his thick,
ruddy moustache; yet, as Cameron could read by the expression that
twinkled in his hazel eyes, secretly not ill-pleased at the result,
however.
'I almost did it--hit him, at all events!' said Holcroft, with
intense mortification, as he was too much of an Englishman not to
wish to excel in everything that appertained to sport.
'Almost!' repeated Angus, who added to Cameron, in a low voice, "_Cha
d'rinse theob riomh sealg!_" (_i.e._, Almost, never killed the game).
'Better luck next time,' said the young Laird of Stratherroch,
consolingly. 'Allan has knocked over his deer, I see.'
'Attempt and Did-not were the two worst hounds of Fingal,' muttered
Angus, in his Perthshire Gaelic, with a furtive glance, fall of
meaning, at Stratherroch.
'To the genuine Highlander,' says a recent English writer, 'it is a
fixed article of belief that there never yet was a Sassenach who knew
more about the wind and weather, or about the innumerable other
mysteries which furnish the stalker with the tact and skill required
to perfect him in his difficult craft, than a cow understands of
conic sections. With true Celtic caution and prudence, the gillies
tolerate the opulent tenant from the south out of respect for his
cheque-book and his frequent drafts upon it; but in their hearts they
look upon him as an _intruder_, and are not sorry when they
contemplate his receding form, as he turns his face homewards, and
leaves moor, loch, and mountain, glen and forest to 'their natural
denizens.'
And in this spirit Angus was secretly regarding the unconscious Mr.
Holcroft, who had the genuine Southern idea that no man of woman born
could undervalue him.
So the little shooting-party united now, and, not unwillingly, all
sat down to have luncheon, as they were sharply appetised by long
exercise in the keen mountain air, and on no other tablecloth than
the purple heather; the ample contents of a hamper--game pies, cold
beef, bread, champagne (cooled in an adjacent runnel), whisky, and so
forth--were laid out by the active hands of the gillies, expectant of
their own repast when the time came.
They lunched near the mossy ruins of a clachan--some of those
melancholy ruins so common over all the Highlands, the traces of a
departed people who have passed away to other lands, evicted by
grasping selfishness to make way for grouse and deer.
There, the low, shattered gables, an old well, some gooseberry bushes
that marked 'where a garden had been,' were all that remained of a
once populous village, whose men had often gone forth to fight for
Scotland in the wars of old, and whose descendants in latter years
had manned more than one company of the Black Watch in Egypt and the
Peninsula.
On the sunny hill-slope close by, a ruined wall, low and
circular--above which appeared the grey arms of a solitary Celtic
cross, an aged yew-tree, and where long grass waved in the
wind--marked where lay the last of the clan, whom no human power
could evict or send towards the setting sun; and these imparted a
melancholy to the solemn scenery, for solemn it was with all its
beauty.
It was of that kind peculiar to some parts of Perthshire, where the
subordinate hills, rising a thousand feet and more above the valley,
are entirely covered with dusky pines, taking away all that
appearance of blackness and desolation presented by naked mountain
masses, and adding softness and beauty to the landscape, which would
otherwise be stern and grim. Nor were the glassy loch and the
murmuring torrent wanting there, nor those passes where the mountains
approach each other, and make them, like that of Killiecrankie, excel
even the famous Vale of Tempe.
Though not very impressionable by Nature, Holcroft, influenced by the
good things he was imbibing, said something about the beauty of the
scenery, to which Lord Aberfeldie responded, adding, with a laugh,
'I do enjoy life in a shooting-box, and of all the entrancing sports
to me there is none like stalking the deer.'
With his sodden knickerbocker suit drying slowly upon him in the
mountain wind, Holcroft could only assent to this faintly, and
wished, perhaps, that, like Stratherroch, he wore a kilt, and could
wring the water out of the plaits thereof.
'Of old in Scotland,' resumed Lord Aberfeldie, as he lit his
briar-root pipe, 'no man was deemed perfect in the craft of hunting
till he had landed a salmon from the pool, shot an eagle on the wing,
and killed a stag. But, when here in a shooting-box, I always thank
heaven that I am at least fifteen miles from a telegraph wire, that
letters can only come once a day, and just before dinner, and bills
and lawyers' letters seldom or never at all. Have a glass of
something before you lunch, Dugald,' he said, addressing his
venerable keeper; 'I know you will prefer Glenlivet to all the
Clicquot and Moet in the world.'
'A cless, thank you kindly, my lord,' replied Dugald, touching his
bonnet, 'though my mouth can hold more of whateffer it be.'
And, bowing to the company, Dugald drained it in quick time.
'I daresay, Holcroft,' said Allan, 'you would prefer the deer driven
to being stalked?'
'Infinitely!' replied the other, as he quaffed a bumper of sparkling
Moselle.
'Well, I for one do not,' said the Master, emphatically.
'The Highlander of old would follow a stag for days, or even for
weeks, if necessary,' observed Lord Aberfeldie, with kindling eyes,
'sleeping in his plaid among the heather, he would lie where night
found him. With his long gaff he would catch a salmon between the
water and the sky; but when stalking he had no conception of the
brutal German battues now so common in the Highlands, and so
degrading to sport,' he added; in his energy, forgetting that there
was something of rebuke in his remarks, which certainly made
Holcroft's cheek redden with annoyance, and his rather shifty eyes to
lower.
The Master, aware that this subject was rather a hobby with his
father, hastened to change the conversation by observing,
'How strange it seems, Stratherroch, that you and I should be so
suddenly here after all these past years with the regiment--here
among the purple heather and green bracken again.'
'And a few weeks hence will see us with it again, and back to the old
pipe-clay routine,' said Cameron.
'Regiments are now no longer what they were in my time,' said Lord
Aberfeldie, a little irrelevantly, perhaps, but pursuing his own
ideas. 'Examinations, cramming and useless pedantry, promotion by
selection and compulsory retirement for the officers, with short
service among the men, render corps no longer what they were in the
old days, each a happy, movable home. The time when a young officer
often said, with just pride and noble ambition, "My father and my
grandfather have both commanded _this_ regiment, and, please God, I
hope at some period to do the same," can never come again! And what
Highland officer now, in the Black Watch or any other of our national
regiments, is followed to the colours by a band of his own name and
kindred, or can speak of his comrades as "my father's people," or
"the men from our glen;" and yet such was the case when yonder ruined
clachan was instinct with village life, and the voices of children
were heard around its humble hearths.'
'The hero of Ghuznee had a theory that no Scotsman was fitted to
command a regiment,' said Stratherroch, laughing.
'I know that he detested Scotsmen, and brought six officers, all
Scotsmen, to a court-martial; and it was then he is said to have made
the statement which cost him so dear in India.'
'How?' asked Holcroft.
'Because, within an hour after, old Colonel Wemyss, of the 52nd,
paraded him in rear of the cantonment, and planted a bullet in his
body by way of curing him of prejudice for the future. Rather a
convincing argument, old Wemyss thought it,' added Aberfeldie,
laughing, as he knocked the ashes from his cherished briar-root, put
it in its case, and dropped it into his silver-mounted sporran.
'Talking of regiments, I saw yours at Portsmouth, Graham,' said
Holcroft; 'and I thought the men looked graceful indeed, with their
kilts over their left shoulders and their black sporrans waving above
their bronzed faces.'
Whether this was meant as a joke or a sneer, it is impossible to say;
but his hearers took it as the former, and laughed accordingly, on
which Holcroft added,
'I mean their plaid-shawls over their shoulders. I remember that
Miss Raymond laughed heartily when I made the same remark.'
'I don't wonder at that,' said Lord Aberfeldie. 'Olive is a girl who
laughs on very slight occasions.'
'You have not seen her since your return,' said Holcroft to Allan
Graham.
'No; but I shall very soon now.'
'She is a very handsome girl; what the deuce have the men been about
to leave her all this time Miss Raymond?'
'All this time? Why, she has not yet seen her twentieth year,'
exclaimed Allan, with some annoyance, as he thought of the photo.
'Her costumes are _chic_,' continued Holcroft, '_chic_ to a degree!
How I admired her portrait in the Grosvenor Gallery; and wise was the
artist to label it "Fair to See."'
Allan glanced at his father, and his face clouded to hear all
this--praise though it was--in the mouth of Hawke Holcroft.
'You have an appreciation of beauty, apparently,' said young Cameron.
'Who has not? Thus, as Disraeli says, "the action of lovely woman on
our destiny is increasing," and, as Miss Raymond----'
'I am Miss Raymond's uncle and guardian,' said Lord Aberfeldie,
rather stiffly, and to Mr. Holcroft, as it seemed, a little
irrelevantly, though cutting short whatever he meant to say; for the
peer winced at the way in which his guest referred to his niece in
the hearing of gillies and gamekeepers, and, more than all, in the
presence of Allan, whose dark eyes wore rather a lowering expression;
but, as all had hearty appetites after their recent exercise and long
exposure in the keen, bracing mountain air of an autumn day, they
were inclined to use their knives and forks rather than their
tongues, and the subject, however pleasing to Mr. Holcroft, was
dropped.
The latter was not a pleasing type of Englishman, though his air and
bearing were thoroughly those of a gentleman. He had a good square
figure, but his legs were somewhat of the spindle order, as his
knickerbocker suit revealed. He was flaxen-haired, fair-skinned, and
somewhat freckled, with a tawny moustache and pale grey eyes; and
strange it was that these, though weak-looking, cunning, and shifty,
would assume at times, but covertly, a defiant, even ferocious
expression, if evil passions excited him.
He was almost destitute of eyebrows, but had a massive chin; and as
Allan Graham regarded him, as he lay stretched upon the grass
leisurely smoking, he by no means showed his father's sentiment of
friendship for this son of an old friend; and there grew in his
breast a mysterious instinct--almost a presentiment--that Holcroft
would in some way or other bring trouble upon them conjunctly or
severally.
After the keepers and gillies had their repast, the luncheon
apparatus was packed up, and, shouldering their rifles, the party set
out for the shooting-box, which was situated in a pretty glen a few
miles distant.
Angus, who was--as his father boasted--strong as Cuchullin, again
lifted the deer to the pony's back, and preceded by the family piper,
Ronald Gair, with his pipes in full blast to the air of 'The Birks of
Aberfeldie,' they departed down the winding path towards the dark
blue loch that lay at the foot of the solemn, pine-clad hills.
Like the gillies and keepers, Ronald was never seen without a sprig
of the _Buaidh craob na Laibhreis_ (the laurel-tree of victory), the
badge of the Grahams, in his bonnet.
Ronald Gair's locks were silver now, but they had been dark enough
when he played the Black Watch up the green slopes of the Alma,
through all Central India, to the gates of Lucknow, and in later
times to the corpse-encumbered swamps of Coomassie.
Holcroft winced at what he deemed the dissonance of the pipes, and
cursed their sound in his heart; but he was too well-bred or too
prudent to say anything on the subject as he strode by Cameron's side
down the strath, with a huge regalia between his teeth. Indeed, he
might have been pretty well used to their sound by this time, as
Ronald Gair roused the household with them in the morning, preceded
many a meal--dinner always--and seemed to spend most of his time in
incessant 'tuning up' between.
'I have a suspicion that he is bad form, this Holcroft,' said Allan
to his father, as they could converse, unheard by the other two, amid
the din of the pipes, which Ronald blew as if to wake the Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus, or Holgar Danske in his cavern at Elsinore. 'I
have heard that he half lives on play and his betting-book, and that
his little place in Essex, or rather what remains of it, is dipped
over head and ears. Indeed, he admitted jocularly to Cameron that it
was mortgaged for thrice its value, three times over, a fact which
would teach the holders prudence for the future. Why did you have
him here or at Dundargue?'
'Well--his father and I were old friends, as you know; his father, in
fact, by an act of great bravery, saved my life at the Alma, when
three Russians were at the point of bayoneting me, as I lay helpless
on the field; so you see, Allan, I cannot help being at least
hospitable to the poor fellow, and certainly his friend.'
Indeed, Lord Aberfeldie had always been the latter to Holcroft, and
not seldom his 'banker,' but of this Allan knew nothing, nor was ever
likely to know, so far as his father was concerned.
'He seems to consider Olive an heiress,' said Allan, after a pause.
'As--of course--she is.'
'And he dared to speak of her under the slangy name of "cash" to
Stratherroch, as I, by chance, overheard.'
Lord Aberfeldie knitted his dark brows, and said,
'I detest slang--it is deuced bad form; but Holcroft belongs, I know,
to a horsey set.'
The sun was setting now, and gradually his crimson glory was paling
in fire on the hill tops, till it faded out and died away, and the
shadows of the September night crept upward step by step from the
deep glens below, and one by one the stars came out above the
trees--a sea of dark and solemn pines that covered all the mountain
slopes--and ere long the red lights from the curtained windows of the
luxurious shooting-lodge were seen to cast long lines of wavering
radiance across the bosom of the loch, by the margin of which it
stood.
Ere this, the great greyhound Shiuloch (whose name means speed) had
returned, drenched with water (showing that he had pursued the stag
into some distant loch) and bloody with more than one wound inflicted
by antlers.
The sharp-set hunters had dined luxuriously, and cigars with brandy
and soda had become the order of the night, when the Master said to
his father,
'I think I have had enough of deer-stalking--three weeks nearly--and
to-morrow I shall start for Dundargue.'
'I think you are wise to do so,' replied Lord Aberfeldie, with a
pointed glance.
'Sorry to lose you, Graham,' said Holcroft, concealing under a bright
smile his secret annoyance, envy, and alarm, of all which more anon.
In this sudden resolution Allan Graham was influenced, perhaps, by
some remarks of his father, the viscount, and pique at those of Hawke
Holcroft, together with a natural longing to see his mother and
sister, and a growing consciousness that he had been somewhat remiss
and, to say the least of it, ungallant to his cousin. Thus, next
day, he took his departure for Dundargue; but he could little foresee
all the bitter complications that were to arise, and to culminate in
the future, through his merely lingering to stalk deer in his
father's forest.
When he went off, none shook his hand more warmly than Hawke
Holcroft, though the latter muttered under his breath,
'Fool that I was, not to make my innings before this fellow came; but
if some people could be put out of the way, that others might take
their place, how much pleasanter this world would be--to other
people, at least.'
Little did the family of Aberfeldie know that in Hawke Holcroft they
had among them an unscrupulous adventurer and most dangerous guest!