Of course Clan MacNicoll was brought to book for this frolic on
Inneraora fair-day, banned by Kirk, and soundly beaten by the Doomster
in name of law. To read some books I’ve read, one would think our Gaels
in the time I speak of, and even now, were pagan and savage. We are not,
I admit it, fashioned on the prim style of London dandies and Italian
fops; we are--the poorest of us--coarse a little at the hide, too quick,
perhaps, to slash out with knife or hatchet, and over-ready to carry
the most innocent argument the dire length of a thrust with the sword.
That’s the blood; it’s the common understanding among ourselves. But we
were never such thieves and marauders, caterans bloody and unashamed, as
the Galloway kerns and the Northmen, and in all my time we had plenty to
do to fend our straths against reivers and cattle-drovers from the bad
clans round about us. We lift no cattle in all Campbell country. When
I was a lad some of the old-fashioned tenants in Glenaora once or twice
went over to Glen Nant and Rannoch and borrowed a few beasts; but the
Earl (as he was then) gave them warning for it that any vassal of his
found guilty of such practice again should hang at the town-head as
readily as he would hang a Cowal man for theftuously awaytaking a board
of kipper salmon. My father (peace with him!) never could see the logic
of it “It’s no theft,” he would urge, “but war on the parish scale: it
needs coolness of the head, some valour, and great genius to take fifty
or maybe a hundred head of bestial hot-hoof over hill and moor. I would
never blame a man for lifting a mart of black cattle any more than for
killing a deer: are not both the natural animals of these mountains,
prey lawful to the first lad who can tether or paunch them?”
“Not in the fold, father!” I mind of remonstrating once.
“In the fold too,” he said. “Who respects Bredal-bane’s fenced deer? Not
the most Christian elders in Glenurchy: they say grace over venison that
crossed a high dyke in the dead of night tail first, or game birds that
tumbled out of their dream on the bough into the reek of a brimstone
fire. A man might as well claim the fish of the sea and the switch of
the wood, and refuse the rest of the world a herring or a block of wood,
as put black cattle in a fank and complain because he had to keep watch
on them!”
It was odd law, but I must admit my father made the practice run with
the precept, for more than once he refused to take back cattle lifted by
the Macgregors from us, because they had got over his march-stone.
But so far from permitting this latitude in the parish of Inneraora,
Kirk and State frowned it down, and sins far less heinous. The session
was bitterly keen on Sabbath-breakers, and to start on a Saturday night
a kiln-drying of oats that would claim a peat or two on Sabbath, was
accounted immorality of the most gross kind.
Much of this strict form, it is to be owned, was imported by the Lowland
burghers, and set up by the Lowland session of the English kirk, of
which his lordship was an elder, and the Highlanders took to it badly
for many a day. They were aye, for a time, driving their cattle through
the town on the Lord’s day or stravaiging about the roads and woods, or
drinking and listening to pipers piping in the change-houses at time of
sermon, fond, as all our people are by nature, of the hearty open air,
and the smell of woods, and lusty sounds like the swing of the seas and
pipers playing old tunes. Out would come elders and deacons to scour the
streets and change-houses for them, driving them, as if with scourges,
into worship. Gaelic sermon (or Irish sermon, as the Scots called
it) was but every second Sabbath, and on the blank days the landward
Highlanders found in town bound to go to English sermon whether they
knew the language or not, a form which it would be difficult nowadays to
defend. And it was, in a way, laughable to see the big Gaels driven to
chapel like boys by the smug light burghers they could have crushed
with a hand. But time told; there was sown in the landward mind by the
blessing of God (and some fear of the Marquis, no doubt) a respect
for Christian ordinance, and by the time I write of there were no more
devout churchgoers and respecters of the law ecclesiastic than the
umquhile pagan small-clans of Loch Firme and the Glens.
It is true that Nicol Beg threatened the church-officer with his dirk
when he came to cite him before the session a few days after the splore
in Inneraora, but he stood his trial like a good Christian all the same,
he and half a score of his clan, as many as the church court could get
the names of. I was a witness against them, much against my will, with
John Splendid, the Provost, and other townsfolk.
Some other defaulters were dealt with before the Mac-Nicolls, a few
throughither women and lads from the back-lanes of the burghs, on the
old tale, a shoreside man for houghing a quey, and a girl Mac Vicar,
who had been for a season on a visit to some Catholic relatives in the
Isles, and was charged with malignancy and profanity.
Poor lass! I was wae for her. She stood bravely beside her father, whose
face was as begrutten as hers was serene, and those who put her through
her catechism found to my mind but a good heart and tolerance where they
sought treachery and rank heresy. They convicted her notwithstanding.
“You have stood your trials badly, Jean MacVicar,” said Master Gordon.
“A backslider and malignant proven! You may fancy your open profession
of piety, your honesty and charity, make dykes to the narrow way. A fond
delusion, woman! There are, sorrow on it! many lax people of your kind
in Scotland this day, hangers-on at the petticoat tails of the whore of
Babylon, sitting like you, as honest worshippers at the tables of the
Lord, eating Christian elements that but for His mercy choked them at
the thrapple. You are a wicked woman!”
“She’s a good daughter,” broke in the father through his tears; but his
Gaelic never stopped the minister.
“An ignorant besom.”
“She’s leech-wife to half Kenmore,” protested the old man.
“And this court censures you, ordains you to make public confession at
both English and Gaelic kirks before the congregations, thereafter to be
excommunicate and banished furth and from this parish of Inneraora and
Glenaora.”
The girl never winced.
Her father cried again. “She can’t leave me,” said he, and he looked to
the Marquis, who all the time sat on the hard deal forms, like a plain
man. “Your lordship kens she is motherless and my only kin; that’s she
true and honest.”
The Marquis said yea nor nay, but had a minute’s talk with the
clergyman, as I thought at the time, to make him modify his ruling. But
Master Gordon enforced the finding of the session.
“Go she must,” said he; “we cannot have our young people poisoned at the
mind.”
“Then she’ll bide with me,” said the father, angrily.
“You dare not, as a Christian professor, keep an excommunicate in your
house,” said Gordon; “but taking to consideration that excommunication
precludes not any company of natural relations, we ordain you never to
keep her in your house in this parish any more; but if you have a mind
to do so with her, to follow her wherever she goes.”
And that sorry small family went out at the door, in tears.
Some curious trials followed, and the making of quaint bylaws; for now
that his lordship, ever a restraining influence on his clans, was bound
for new wars elsewhere, a firmer hand was wanted on the people he left
behind, and Master Gordon pressed for stricter canons. Notification was
made discharging the people of the burgh from holding lyke-wakes in
the smaller houses, from unnecessary travel on the Sabbath, from public
flyting and abusing, and from harbouring ne’er-do-weels from other
parishes; and seeing it had become a practice of the women attending
kirk to keep their plaids upon their heads and faces in time of sermon
as occasion of sleeping, as also that they who slept could not be
distinguished from those who slept not, that they might be wakened, it
was ordained that such be not allowed hereafter, under pain of taking
the plaids from them.
With these enactments too came evidence of the Kirk’s paternity.
It settled the salary (200 pounds Scots) of a new master for the
grammar-school, agreed to pay the fees of divers poor scholars,
instructed the administering of the funds in the poor’s-box, fixed a
levy on the town for the following week to help the poorer wives who
would be left by their fencible husbands, and paid ten marks to an
elderly widow woman who desired, like a good Gael, to have her burial
clothes ready, but had not the wherewithal for linen.
“We are,” said Master Gordon, sharpening a pen in a pause ere the
MacNicolls came forward, “the fathers and guardians of this parish
people high and low. Too long has Loch Finne side been ruled childishly.
I have no complaint about its civil rule--his lordship here might well
be trusted to that; but its religion was a thing of rags. They tell me
old Campbell in the Gaelic end of the church (peace with him!) used
to come to the pulpit with a broadsword belted below his Geneva gown.
Savagery, savagery, rank and stinking! I’ll say it to his face in
another world, and a poor evangel and ensample truly for the quarrelsome
landward folk of this parish, that even now, in the more unctuous times
of God’s grace, doff steel weapons so reluctantly. I found a man with a
dirk at his hip sitting before the Lord’s table last Lammas!”
“Please God,” said the Marquis, “the world shall come to its sight
some day. My people are of an unruly race, I ken, good at the heart,
hospitable, valorous, even with some Latin chivalry; but, my sorrow!
they are sorely unamenable to policies of order and peace.”
“Deil the hair vexed am I,” said John Splendid in my ear; “I have a
wonderful love for nature that’s raw and human, and this session-made
morality is but a gloss. They’ll be taking the tartan off us next maybe!
Some day the old dog at the heart of the Highlands will bark for all
his sleek coat Man! I hate the very look of those Lowland cattle sitting
here making kirk laws for their emperors, and their bad-bred Scots
speech jars on my ear like an ill-tuned bagpipe.”
Master Gordon possibly guessed what was the topic of Splendid’s
confidence,--in truth, few but knew my hero’s mind on these matters;
and I have little doubt it was for John’s edification he went on to
sermonise, still at the shaping of his pen.
“Your lordship will have the civil chastisement of these MacNicolls
after this session is bye with them. We can but deal with their
spiritual error. Nicol Beg and his relatives are on our kirk rolls as
members or adherents, and all we can do is to fence the communion-table
against them for a period, and bring them to the stool of repentance.
Some here may think a night of squabbling and broken heads in a Highland
burgh too trifling an affair for the interference of the kirk or the
court of law: I am under no such delusion. There is a valour better than
the valour of the beast unreasoning. Your lordship has seen it at its
proper place in your younger wars; young Elrigmore, I am sure, has seen
it on the Continent, where men live quiet burgh lives while left alone,
and yet comport themselves chivalrously and gallantly on the stricken
fields when their country or a cause calls for them so to do. In the
heart of man is hell smouldering, always ready to leap out in flames of
sharpened steel; it’s a poor philosophy that puffs folly in at the ear
to stir the ember, saying, ‘Hiss, catch him, dog!’ I’m for keeping hell
(even in a wild High-landman’s heart) for its own business of punishing
the wicked.”
“Amen to yon!” cried MacCailein, beating his hand on a book-board, and
Master Gordon took a snuff like a man whose doctrine is laid out plain
for the world and who dare dispute it. In came the beadle with the
MacNicolls, very much cowed, different men truly from the brave
gentlemen who cried blood for blood on Provost Brown’s stair.
They had little to deny, and our evidence was but a word ere the session
passed sentence of suspension from the kirk tables, as Gordon had said,
and a sheriffs officer came to hale them to the Tolbooth for their trial
on behalf of the civil law.
With their appearance there my tale has nothing to do; the Doomster, as
I have said, had the handling of them with birch. What I have described
of this kirk-session’s cognisance of those rough fellows’ ill behaviour
is designed ingeniously to convey a notion of its strict ceremony and
its wide dominion,--to show that even in the heart of Arraghael we were
not beasts in that year when the red flash of the sword came on us and
the persecution of the torch. The MacNicoll’s Night in the Hie Street of
MacCailein Mot’s town was an adventure uncommon enough to be spoken of
for years after, and otherwise (except for the little feuds between the
Glens-men and the burghers without tartan), our country-side was as safe
as the heart of France--safer even. You might leave your purse on the
open road anywhere within the Crooked Dyke with uncounted gold in it and
be no penny the poorer at the week’s end; there was never lock or bar on
any door in any of the two glens--locks, indeed, were a contrivance the
Lowlanders brought for the first time to the town; and the gardens lay
open to all who had appetite for kail or berry. There was no man who sat
down to dinner (aye in the landward part I speak of; it differed in the
town) without first going to the door to look along the high road to
see if wayfarers were there to share the meal with him and his family.
“There he goes,” was the saying about any one who passed the door at
any time without coming in to take a spoon--“there he goes; I’ll warrant
he’s a miser at home to be so much of a churl abroad” The very gipsy
claimed the cleanest bed in a Glenman’s house whenever he came that way,
and his gossip paid handsomely for his shelter.
It was a fine fat land this of ours, mile upon mile thick with herds,
rolling in the grassy season like the seas, growing such lush crops as
the remoter Highlands never dreamt of. Not a foot of good soil but had
its ploughing, or at least gave food to some useful animal, and yet so
rocky the hills between us and lower Lochow, so tremendous steep and
inaccessible the peaks and corries north of Ben Bhuidhe, that they were
relegated to the chase. There had the stag his lodging and the huntsman
a home almost perpetual. It was cosy, indeed, to see at evening the
peat-smoke from well-governed and comfortable hearths lingering on the
quiet air, to go where you would and find bairns toddling on the braes
or singing women bent to the peat-creel and the reaping-hook.
In that autumn I think nature gave us her biggest cup brimmingly, and my
father, as he watched his servants binding corn head high, said he
had never seen the like before. In the hazel-woods the nuts bent the
branches, so thick were they, so succulent; the hip and the haw, the
blaeberry and the rowan, swelled grossly in a constant sun; the orchards
of the richer folks were in a revelry of fruit Somehow the winter
grudged, as it were, to come. For ordinary, October sees the trees that
beard Dun-chuach and hang for miles on the side of Creag Dubh searing
and falling below the frost; this season the cold stayed aloof long, and
friendly winds roved from the west and south. The forests gleamed in a
golden fire that only cooled to darkness when the firs, my proud tall
friends, held up their tasselled heads in unquenching green. Birds
swarmed in the heather, and the sides of the bare hills moved constantly
with deer. Never a stream in all real Argile but boiled with fish; you
came down to Eas-a-chleidh on the Aora with a creel and dipped it into
the linn to bring out salmon rolling with fat.
All this I dwell on for a sensible purpose, though it may seem to be
but an old fellow’s boasting and a childish vanity about my own
calf-country. ‘Tis the picture I would paint--a land laughing and
content, well governed by Gillesbeg, though Gruamach he might be by name
and by nature. Fourpence a-day was a labourer’s wage, but what need had
one of even fourpence, with his hut free and the food piling richly at
his very door?