The Highlanders of Lochaber, as the old saying goes, “pay their
daughters’ tochers by the light of the Michaelmas moon.” Then it was
that they were wont to come over our seven hills and seven waters to
help themselves to our cattle when the same were at their fattest and
best It would be a skurry of bare knees down pass and brae, a ring of
the robbers round the herd sheltering on the bieldy side of the hill or
in the hollows among the ripe grass, a brisk change of shot and blow if
alarm rose, and then hie! over the moor by Macfarlane’s lantern.
This Michaelmas my father put up a _buaile-mhart_, a square fold of
wattle and whinstone, into which the herdsmen drove the lowing beasts
at the mouth of every evening, and took turn about in watching them
throughout the clear season. It was perhaps hardly needed, for indeed
the men of Lochaber and Glenfalloch and the other dishonest regions
around us were too busy dipping their hands in the dirty work of
Montrose and his Irish major-general to have any time for their usual
autumn’s recreation. But a _buaile-mhart_ when shifted from time to time
in a field is a profitable device in agriculture, and custom had made
the existence of it almost a necessity to the sound slumber of our
glens. There was a pleasant habit, too, of neighbours gathering at night
about a fire within one of the spaces of the fold and telling tales
and singing songs. Our whole West Country is full of the most wonderful
stories one might seek in vain for among the world of books and
scholars--of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, and
sea-maiden. The most unlikely looking peasant that ever put his foot to
a _caschrom_, the most uncouth hunter that ever paunched a deer, would
tell of such histories in the most scrupulous language and with cunning
regard for figure of speech. I know that nowadays, among people of
esteemed cultivation in the low country and elsewhere, such a
diversion might be thought a waste of time, such narratives a sign of
superstition. Of that I am not so certain. The practice, if it did
no more, gave wings to our most sombre hours, and put a point on the
imagination. As for the superstition of the tales of _ceilidh_ and
_buaile-mhart_ I have little to say. Perhaps the dullest among us
scarce credited the giant and dwarf; but the Little Folks are yet on our
topmost hills.
A doctor laughed at me once for an experience of my own at the Piper’s
Knowe, on which any man, with a couchant ear close to the grass, may
hear fairy tunes piped in the under-world.
“A trick of the senses,” said he.
“But I can bring you scores who have heard it!” said I.
“So they said of every miracle since time began,” said he; “it but
proves the widespread folly and credulity of human nature.”
I protested I could bring him to the very spot or whistle him the very
tunes; but he was busy, and wondered so sedate a man as myself could
cherish so strange a delusion.
Our fold on Elrigmore was in the centre of a flat meadowland that lies
above Dhu Loch, where the river winds among rush and willow-tree, a
constant whisperer of love and the distant hills and the salt inevitable
sea. There we would be lying under moon and star, and beside us the
cattle deeply breathing all night long. To the simple tale of old, to
the humble song, these circumstances gave a weight and dignity they may
have wanted elsewhere. Never a teller of tale, or a singer of song so
artless in that hour and mood of nature, but he hung us breathless on
his every accent: we were lone inhabitants of a little space in a
magic glen, and the great world outside the flicker of our fire hummed
untenanted and empty through the jealous night.
It happened on a night of nights--as the saying goes--that thus we
were gathered in the rushy flat of Elrigmore and our hearts easy as to
reivers--for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?--when
a hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the last
days of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckled
with sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling in
the east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air.
We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had set
proverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was the
young morning when through the long grass to the fold came a band of
strangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission might
be, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch.
The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of them
came forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they could
look in and see the watchers gathered round the fire.
“Co tha’n sud’s an uchd air a bhuaile?” (“Who is there leaning on the
fold?”) asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands.
He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastly
eerie in their silence on the wall.
“Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m’inthaidh aig an fhear as gile
broilleach agaibh” (“My arrow’s for the whitest breast, if ye make no
answer “), said my man, and there was no answer.
The string twanged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the white
breast fell--shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clan
they name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when we
rushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field.
They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, but
namely now through the west for their depredations when the absence of
their men in battles threw them upon their own resource.
And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grieved
at slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay passing, with the
blood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran each
other in their hurry from her foul lips.
“Dogs! dogs!--heaven’s worst ill on ye, dogs!” she cried, a waeful
spectacle, and she spat on us as we carried her beside the fire to try
and staunch her wound. She had a fierce knife at her waist and would
have used it had she the chance, but we removed it from her reach, and
she poured a fresher, fuller stream of malediction.
Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it was
then--with the sweat on her brow--she gave the hint I speak of, the hint
of the war’s end and the end of MacCailein Mor.
“Wry-mouths, wry-mouths!” said she; “I see the heather above the myrtle
on Lhinne-side, and MacCailein’s head on a post.”
That was all.
It is a story you will find in no books, and yet a story that has been
told sometime or other by every fireside of the shire--not before the
prophecy was fulfilled but after, when we were loosed from our bonded
word. For there and then we took oath on steel to tell no one of the
woman’s saying till the fulness of time should justify or disgrace the
same.
Though I took oath on this melancholy business like the rest, there was
one occasion, but a day or two after, that I almost broke my pledged
word, and that to the lady who disturbed my Sunday worship and gave me
so much reflection on the hunting-road. Her father, as I have said, came
up often on a Saturday and supped his curds-and-cream and grew cheery
over a Dutch bottle with my father, and one day, as luck had it, Betty
honoured our poor doorstep. She came so far, perhaps, because our men
and women were at work on the field I mention, whose second crop of
grass they were airing for the winter byres--a custom brought to the
glen from foreign parts, and with much to recommend it.
I had such a trepidation at her presence that I had almost fled on some
poor excuse to the hill; but the Provost, who perhaps had made sundry
calls in the bye-going at houses farther down the glen, and was in a
mellow humour, jerked a finger over his shoulder towards the girl as she
stood hesitating in the hall after a few words with my father and me,
and said, “I’ve brought you a good harvester here, Colin, and she’ll
give you a day’s darg for a kiss.”
I stammered a stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on so
warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity.
Mistress Betty coloured and bit her lip.
“Look at the hussy!” said her father again, laughing with heaving
shoulders. “‘Where shall we go to-day on our rounds?’ said I; ‘Where but
to Elrigmore,’ said she; ‘I have not seen Colin for an age!’ Yet I’ll
warrant you thought the cunning jade shy of a gentleman soldier! Ah,
those kirtles, those kirtles! I’ll give you a word of wisdom, sir, you
never learned in Glascow Hie Street nor in the army.”
I looked helplessly after the girl, who had fled, incontinent, to the
women at work in the field.
“Well, sir,” I said, “I shall be pleased to hear it. If it has any
pertinence to the harvesting of a second crop it would be welcome.”
My father sighed. He never entered very heartily into diversion
nowadays--small wonder!--so the Provost laughed on with his counsel.
“You know very well it has nothing to do with harvesting nor harrowing,”
he cried; “I said kirtles, didn’t I! And you needn’t be so coy about the
matter; surely to God you never learned modesty at your trade of sacking
towns. Many a wench----”
“About this counsel,” I put in; “I have no trick or tale of wenchcraft
beyond the most innocent. And beside, sir, I think we were just talking
of a lady who is your daughter.”
Even in his glass he was the gentleman, for he saw the suggestion at
once.
“Of course, of course, Colin,” he said hurriedly, coughing in a
confusion. “Never mind an old fool’s havering.” Then said he again,
“There’s a boy at many an old man’s heart. I saw you standing there and
my daughter was yonder, and it just came over me like the verse of a
song that I was like you when I courted her mother. My sorrow! it looks
but yesterday, and yet here’s an old done man! Folks have been born and
married (some of them) and died since syne, and I’ve been going through
life with my eyes shut to my own antiquity. It came on me like a flash
three minutes ago, that this gross oldster, sitting of a Saturday
sipping the good _aqua_ of Elrigmore, with a pendulous waistcoat and a
wrinkled hand, is not the lad whose youth and courtship you put me in
mind of.”
“Stretch your hand, Provost, and fill your glass,” said my father. He
was not merry in his later years, but he had a hospitable heart.
The two of them sat dumb a space, heedless of the bottle or me, and at
last, to mar their manifest sad reflections, I brought the Provost back
to the topic of his counsel.
“You had a word of advice,” I said, very softly. There was a small tinge
of pleasure in my guess that what he had to say might have reference to
his daughter.
“Man! I forget now,” he said, rousing himself. “What were we on?”
“Harvesting,” said father.
“No, sir; kirtles,” said I.
“Kirtles--so it was,” said the Provost. “My wife at Betty’s age, when
I first sought her company, was my daughter’s very model, in face and
figure.”
“She was a handsome woman, Provost,” said my father. “I can well believe
it,” said I. “She is that to-day,” cried the Provost, pursing his lips
and lifting up his chin in a challenge. “And I learned one thing at the
courting of her which is the gist of my word of wisdom to you, Colin.
Keep it in mind till you need it. It’s this: There’s one thing a woman
will put up with blandly in every man but the one man she has a notion
of, and that’s the absence of conceit about himself or her.” In the
field by the river, the harvesters sat at a mid-day meal, contentedly
eating their bannock and cheese. They were young folks all, at the age
when toil and plain living but give a zest to the errant pleasures of
life, so they filled their hour of leisure with gallivanting among the
mown and gathered grass. And oh! _mo chridhe_, but that was long ago!
Let no one, remembering the charm of an autumn field in his youth, test
its cheerfulness when he has got up in years. For he will find it lying
under a sun less genial than then; he will fret at some influence lost;
the hedges tall and beautiful will have turned to stunted boundaries
upon his fancy; he will ache at the heart at the memory of those old
careless crops and reapers when he sits, a poor man or wealthy, among
the stubble of grass and youth.
As I lay on the shady side of an alder bank watching our folk at their
gambols, I found a serenity that again set me at my ease with the
Provost’s daughter. I gathered even the calmness to invite her to sit
beside me, and she made no demur.
“You are short of reapers, I think, by the look of them,” she said; “I
miss some of the men who were here last year.”
They were gone with MacCailein, I explained, as paid volunteers.
“Oh! those wars!” she cried sadly. “I wish they were ended. Here are
the fields, good crops, food and happiness for all, why must men be
fighting?”
“Ask your Highland heart,” said I. “We are children of strife.”
“In my heart,” she replied, “there’s but love for all. I toss sleepless,
at night, thinking of the people we know--the good, kind, gallant; merry
lads we know--waging savage battle for something I never had the wit to
discover the meaning of.”
“The Almighty’s order--we have been at it from the birth of time.”
“So old a world might have learned,” she said, “to break that order when
they break so many others. Is his lordship likely to be back soon?”
“I wish he might be,” said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the
heather above the myrtle and MacCailein’s head on a post “Did you hear
of the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?”
“Yes,” she said; “an ugly business! What has that to do with
MacCailein’s home-coming?”
“Very little indeed,” I answered, recalling our bond; “but she cursed
his lordship and his army with a zeal that was alarming, even to an old
soldier of Sweden.”
“God ward all evil!” cried Betty in a passion of earnestness. “You’ll be
glad to see your friend M’Iver back, I make no doubt.”
“Oh! he’s an old hand at war, madam; he’ll come safe out of this by his
luck and skill, if he left the army behind him.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said she, smiling.
“What!” I cried in raillery; “would you be grateful for so poor a
balance left of a noble army?”
And she reddened and smiled again, and a servant cried us in to the
dinner-table.
In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home in
the fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter,
the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by the
Lowlands, where he had a mission to the Estates. The war, for the time,
was over, a truce of a kind was patched up, and there was a cheerful
prospect--too briefly ours--that the country would settle anon to peace.