Produced by David Widger
JOHN SPLENDID
The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn
By Neil Munro
William Blackwood And Sons
Edinburgh And London
MDCCCXCVIII
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[Illustration: titlepage]
CONTENTS: (Note: Chapter XII notation
skipped in the print copy.)
CHAPTER I.—FROM THE FOREIGN FIELD.
CHAPTER II.—GILLESBEG GRUAMACH.
CHAPTER III.—THE LADY ON THE STAIR.
CHAPTER IV.—A NIGHT ALARM.
CHAPTER V.—KIRK LAW.
CHAPTER VI.—MY LADY OF MOODS.
CHAPTER VII.—CHILDREN OF THE MIST.
CHAPTER VIII.—THE BALE-FIRES ON THE BENS.
CHAPTER IX.—INVASION.
CHAPTER X.—THE FLIGHT TO THE FOREST.
CHAPTER XI.—ON BENS OF WAR.
CHAPTER XIII.—WHERE TREADS THE DEER.
CHAPTER XIV.—MY LADY AND THE CHILD.
CHAPTER XV.—CONFESSIONS OF A MARQUIS.
CHAPTER XVI.—OUR MARCH FOR LOCHABER.
CHAPTER XVII.—IN THE LAND OF LORN.
CHAPTER XVIII.—BARD OF KEPPOCH.
CHAPTER XIX.—THE MIRACULOUS JOURNEY.
CHAPTER XX.—INVERLOCHY.
CHAPTER XXI.—SEVEN BROKEN MEN.
CHAPTER XXII.—DAME DUBH.
CHAPTER XXIII.—THE WIDOW OF GLENCOE.
CHAPTER XXIV.—A NIGHT’S SHELTER.
CHAPTER XXV.—THE ANGRY EAVESDROPPER.
CHAPTER XXVI.—TRAPPED.
CHAPTER XXVII.—A TAVERN IN THE WILDS.
CHAPTER XXVIII.—LOST ON THIS MOOR OF KANNOCH.
CHAPTER XXIX.—THE RETURN.
CHAPTER XXX.—ARGILE’S BEDROOM.
CHAPTER XXXI.—MISTRESS BETTY.
CHAPTER XXXII.—A SCANDAL AND A QUARREL.
CHAPTER XXXIII.—THE BROKEN SWORD.
CHAPTER XXXIV.—LOVE IN THE WOODS.
CHAPTER XXXV.—FAREWELL.
DEDICATION.
To read this tale, dear Hugh, without any association of its incidents
with the old respectable chronicles of the Historians is what I should
wish you could always do. That is the happy manner with Romance; that is
the enviable aptness of the child. But when (by the favour of God) you
grow older and more reflective, seeking perhaps for more in these pages
than they meant to give, you may wonder that the streets, the lanes, the
tenements herein set forth so much resemble those we know to-day, though
less than two hundred years ago the bracken waved upon their promontory.
You may wonder, too, that the Silver Mines of Coillebhraid, discovered
in the time of your greatgrandfather, should have so strangely
been anticipated in the age of Gillesbeg Gruamach. Let not those
chronological divergences perturb you; they were in the manuscript
(which you will be good enough to assume) of Elrigmore, and I would not
alter them. Nor do I diminish by a single hour Elrigmore’s estimate
that two days were taken on the Miraculous Journey to Inverlochy,
though numerous histories have made it less. In that, as in a few other
details, Elrigmore’s account is borne out by one you know to whom The
Little Wars of Lorn and Lochaber are yet, as it were, an impulse of
yesterday, and the name of Athole is utterly detestable.
I give you this book, dear Hugh, not for History, though a true tale--a
sad old tale--is behind it, but for a picture of times and manners, of a
country that is dear to us in every rock and valley, of a people we know
whose blood is ours. And that you may grow in wisdom as in years, and
gain the riches of affection, and escape the giants of life as Connal
did the giants of Erin O, in our winter tale, is my fervent prayer.
N. M.
September 1898.
JOHN SPLENDID.
CHAPTER I.--FROM THE FOREIGN FIELD.
Many a time, in college or in camp, I had planned the style of my
home-coming. Master Webster, in the Humanities, droning away like a
Boreraig bagpipe, would be sending my mind back to Shira Glen, its braes
and corries and singing waters, and Ben Bhuidhe over all, and with my
chin on a hand I would ponder on how I should go home again when this
weary scholarship was over. I had always a ready fancy and some of the
natural vanity of youth, so I could see myself landing off the lugger at
the quay of Inneraora town, three inches more of a man than when I
left with a firkin of herring and a few bolls of meal for my winter’s
provand; thicker too at the chest, and with a jacket of London green
cloth with brass buttons. Would the fishermen about the quay-head
not lean over the gun’les of their skiffs and say, “There goes young
Elrigmore from Colleging, well-knit in troth, and a pretty lad”? I could
hear (all in my daydream in yon place of dingy benches) the old women
about the well at the town Cross say, “Oh _laochain!_ thou art come back
from the Galldach, and Glascow College; what a thousand curious things
thou must know, and what wisdom thou must have, but never a change on
thine affability to the old and to the poor!” But it was not till I had
run away from Glascow College, and shut the boards for good and all, as
I thought, on my humane letters and history, and gone with cousin Gavin
to the German wars in Mackay’s Corps of true Highlanders, that I added a
manlier thought to my thinking of the day when I should come home to
my native place. I’ve seen me in the camp at night, dog-wearied after
stoury marching on their cursed foreign roads, keeping my eyes open and
the sleep at an arm’s-length, that I might think of Shira Glen. Whatever
they may say of me or mine, they can never deny but I had the right fond
heart for my own countryside, and I have fought men for speaking of its
pride and poverty--their ignorance, their folly!--for what did they ken
of the Highland spirit? I would be lying in the lap of the night, and
my Ferrara sword rolled in my plaid as a pillow for my head, fancying
myself--all those long wars over, march, siege, and sack--riding on a
good horse down the pass of Aora and through the arches into the old
town. Then, it was not the fishermen or the old women I thought of,
but the girls, and the winking stars above me were their eyes, glinting
merrily and kindly on a stout young gentleman soldier with jack and
morion, sword at haunch, spur at heel, and a name for bravado never a
home-biding laird in our parish had, burgh or landward. I would sit on
my horse so, the chest well out, the back curved, the knees straight,
one gauntlet off to let my white hand wave a salute when needed, and
none of all the pretty ones would be able to say Elrigmore thought
another one the sweetest Oh! I tell you we learnt many arts in the
Lowland wars, more than they teach Master of Art in the old biggin’ in
the Hie Street of Glascow.
One day, at a place called Nordlingen near the Mid Franken, binding
a wound Gavin got in the sword-arm, I said, “What’s your wish at this
moment, cousin?”
He looked at me with a melting eye, and the flush hove to his face.
“‘Fore God, Colin,” said he, “I would give my twelve months’ wage to
stand below the lintel of my mother’s door and hear her say ‘Darling
scamp!’”
“If you had your wish, Gavin, when and how would you go into Inneraora
town after those weary years away?”
“Man, I’ve made that up long syne,” said he, and the tear was at his
cheek. “Let me go into it cannily at night-fall from the Cromalt end,
when the boys and girls were dancing on the green to the pipes at the
end of a harvest-day. Them in a reel, with none of the abulziements of
war about me, but a plain civil lad like the rest, I would join in the
strathspey and kiss two or three of the girls ere ever they jaloused a
stranger was among them.”
Poor Gavin, good Gavin! he came home no way at all to his mother and his
mountains; but here was I, with some of his wish for my fortune, riding
cannily into Inneraora town in the dark.
It is wonderful how travel, even in a marching company of cavaliers of
fortune, gives scope to the mind. When I set foot, twelve years before
this night I speak of, on the gabert that carried me down to Dunbarton
on my way to the Humanities classes, I could have sworn I was leaving
a burgh most large and wonderful. The town houses of old Stonefield,
Craignish, Craignure, Asknish, and the other cadets of Clan Campbell,
had such a strong and genteel look; the windows, all but a very few,
had glass in every lozen, every shutter had a hole to let in the morning
light, and each door had its little ford of stones running across the
gutter that sped down the street, smelling fishily a bit, on its way to
the shore. For me, in those days, each close that pierced the tall lands
was as wide and high as a mountain _eas_, the street itself seemed broad
and substantial, crowded with people worth kenning for their graces and
the many things they knew.
I came home now on this night of nights with Munchen and Augsburg, and
the fine cities of all the France, in my mind, and I tell you I could
think shame of this mean rickle of stones I had thought a town, were it
not for the good hearts and kind I knew were under every roof. The
broad street crowded with people, did I say? A little lane rather; and
Elrigmore, with schooling and the wisdom of travel, felt he could see
into the heart’s core of the cunningest merchant in the place.
But anyway, here I was, riding into town from the Cromalt end on a night
in autumn. It was after ten by my Paris watch when I got the length of
the Creags, and I knew that there was nothing but a sleeping town before
me, for our folks were always early bedders when the fishing season was
on. The night hung thick with stars, but there was no moon; a stiff wind
from the east prinked at my right ear and cooled my horse’s skin, as he
slowed down after a canter of a mile or two on this side of Pennymore.
Out on the loch I could see the lights of a few herring-boats lift and
fall at the end of their trail of nets.
“Too few of you there for the town to be busy and cheerful,” said I to
myself; “no doubt the bulk of the boats are down at Otter, damming the
fish in the narrow gut, and keeping them from searching up to our own
good townsmen.”
I pressed my brute to a trot, and turned round into the nether part of
the town. It was what I expected--the place was dark, black out. The
people were sleeping; the salt air of Loch Finne went sighing through
the place in a way that made me dowie for old days. We went over the
causeway-stones with a clatter that might have wakened the dead, but no
one put a head out, and I thought of the notion of a cheery home-coming
poor Gavin had--my dear cousin, stroked out and cold under foreign clods
at Velshiem, two leagues below the field of Worms of Hessen, on the
banks of the Rhine, in Low Germanie.
It is a curious business this riding into a town in the dark waste of
night; curious even in a strange town when all are the same for you that
sleep behind those shutters and those doors, but doubly curious when you
know that behind the dark fronts are folk lying that you know well, that
have been thinking, and drinking, and thriving when you were far
away. As I went clattering slowly by, I would say at one house front,
“Yonder’s my old comrade, Tearlach, who taught me my one tune on the
pipe-chanter; is his beard grown yet, I wonder?” At another, “There
is the garret window of the schoolmaster’s daughter--does she sing so
sweetly nowadays in the old kirk?”
In the dead middle of the street I pulled my horse up, just to study the
full quietness of the hour. Leaning over, I put a hand on his nostrils
and whispered in his ear for a silence, as we do abroad in ambuscade.
Town Innera-ora slept sound, sure enough! All to hear was the spilling
of the river at the cascade under the bridge and the plopping of the
waves against the wall we call the ramparts, that keeps the sea from
thrashing on the Tolbooth. And then over all I could hear a most strange
moaning sound, such as we boys used to make with a piece of lath nicked
at the edges and swung hurriedly round the head by a string. It was made
by the wind, I knew, for it came loudest in the gusty bits of the night
and from the east, and when there was a lull I could hear it soften away
and end for a second or two with a dunt, as if some heavy, soft thing
struck against wood.
Whatever it was, the burghers of Inneraora paid no heed, but slept,
stark and sound, behind their steeked shutters.
The solemnity of the place that I knew so much better in a natural
lively mood annoyed me, and I played there and then a prank more
becoming a boy in his first kilt than a gentleman of education and
travel and some repute for sobriety. I noticed I was opposite the house
of a poor old woman they called Black Kate, whose door was ever the
target in my young days for every lad that could brag of a boot-toe,
and I saw that the shutter, hanging ajee on one hinge, was thrown open
against the harled wall of the house. In my doublet-pocket there were
some carabeen bullets, and taking one out, I let bang at the old woman’s
little lozens. There was a splinter of glass, and I waited to see if
any one should come out to find who had done the damage. My trick was
in vain; no one came. Old Kate, as I found next day, was dead since
Martinmas, and her house was empty.
Still the moaning sound came from the town-head, and I went slowly
riding in its direction. It grew clearer and yet uncannier as I sped on,
and mixed with the sough of it I could hear at last the clink of chains.
“What in God’s name have I here?” said I to myself, turning round Islay
Campbell’s corner, and yonder was my answer!
The town gibbets were throng indeed! Two corpses swung in the wind, like
net bows on a drying-pole, going from side to side, making the woeful
sough and clink of chains, and the dunt I had heard when the wind
dropped.
I grued more at the sound of the soughing than at the sight of the
hanged fellows, for I’ve seen the Fell Sergeant in too many ugly
fashions to be much put about at a hanging match. But it was such a poor
home-coming! It told me as plain as could be, what I had heard rumours
of in the low country, riding round from the port of Leith, that the
land was uneasy, and that pit and gallows were bye-ordinar busy at the
gates of our castle. When I left for my last session at Glascow College,
the countryside was quiet as a village green, never a raider nor a
reiver in the land, and so poor the Doomster’s trade (Black George) that
he took to the shoeing of horses.
“There must be something wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant
indeed,” I thought, “when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a
drunkard’s convoy on either hand to prop it up.”
But it was no time for meditation. Through the rags of plaiding on the
chains went the wind again so eerily that I bound to be off, and I put
my horse to it, bye the town-head and up the two miles to Glen Shira. I
was sore and galled sitting on the saddle; my weariness hung at the back
of my legs and shoulders like an ague, and there was never a man in this
world came home to his native place so eager for taking supper and sleep
as young Elrigmore.
What I expected at my father’s door I am not going to set down here. I
went from it a fool, with not one grace about me but the love of my good
mother, and the punishment I had for my hot and foolish cantrip was many
a wae night on foreign fields, vexed to the core for the sore heart I
had left at home.
My mind, for all my weariness, was full of many things, and shame above
all, as I made for my father’s house. The horse had never seen Glen
Shira, but it smelt the comfort of the stable and whinnied cheerfully
as I pulled up at the gate. There was but one window to the gable-end of
Elrigmore, and it was something of a surprise to me to find a light in
it, for our people were not overly rich in these days, and candle or
cruisie was wont to be doused at bedtime. More was my surprise when,
leading my horse round to the front, feeling my way in the dark by
memory, I found the oak door open and my father, dressed, standing in
the light of it.
A young _sgalag_ came running to the reins, and handing them to him, I
stepped into the light of the door, my bonnet in my hand.
“Step in, sir, caird or gentleman,” said my father--looking more bent at
the shoulder than twelve years before.
I went under the door-lintel, and stood a little abashed before him.
“Colin! Colin!” he cried in the Gaelic “Did I not ken it was you?” and
he put his two hands on my shoulders.
“It is Colin sure enough, father dear,” I said, slipping readily enough
into the mother tongue they did their best to get out of me at Glascow
College. “Is he welcome in this door?” and the weariness weighed me down
at the hip and bowed my very legs.
He gripped me tight at the elbows, and looked me hungrily in the face.
“If you had a murdered man’s head in your oxter, Colin,” said he, “you
were still my son. Colin, Colin! come ben and put off your boots!”
“Mother------” I said, but he broke in on my question.
“Come in, lad, and sit down. You are back from the brave wars you never
went to with my will, and you’ll find stirring times here at your own
parish. It’s the way of the Sennachies’ stories.”
“How is that, sir?”
“They tell, you know, that people wander far on the going foot for
adventure, and adventure is in the first turning of their native lane.”
I was putting my boots off before a fire of hissing logs that filled the
big room with a fir-wood smell right homely and comforting to my heart,
and my father was doing what I should have known was my mother’s office
if weariness had not left me in a sort of stupor--he was laying on the
board a stout and soldierly supper and a tankard of the red Bordeaux
wine the French traffickers bring to Loch Finne to trade for cured
herring. He would come up now and then where I sat fumbling sleepily at
my belt, and put a hand on my head, a curious unmanly sort of thing I
never knew my father do before, and I felt put-about at this petting,
which would have been more like my sister if ever I had had the luck to
have one.
“You are tired, Colin, my boy?” he said.
“A bit, father, a bit,” I answered; “rough roads you know. I was landed
at break of day at Skipness and--Is mother------?”
“Sit in, _laochain!_ Did you meet many folks on the road?”
“No, sir; as pestilent barren a journey as ever I trotted on, and the
people seemingly on the hill, for their crops are unco late in the
field.”
“Ay, ay, lad, so they are,” said my father, pulling back his shoulders a
bit--a fairly straight wiry old man, with a name for good swordsmanship
in his younger days.
I was busy at a cold partridge, and hard at it, when I thought again how
curious it was that my father should be a-foot in the house at such time
of night and no one else about, he so early a bedder for ordinary and
never the last to sneck the outer door.
“Did you expect any one, father,” I asked, “that you should be waiting
up with the collation, and the outer door unsnecked?”
“There was never an outer door snecked since you left, Colin,” said he,
turning awkwardly away and looking hard into the loof of his hand like
a wife spaeing fortunes--for sheer want, I could see, of some engagement
for his eyes. “I could never get away with the notion that some way like
this at night would ye come back to Elngmore.”
“Mother would miss me?”
“She did, Colin, she did; I’m not denying.”
“She’ll be bedded long syne, no doubt, father?”
My father looked at me and gulped at the throat.
“Bedded indeed, poor Colin,” said he, “this very day in the clods of
Kilmalieu!”
And that was my melancholy home-coming to my father’s house of Elngmore,
in the parish of Glcnaora, in the shire of Argile.