Hard on the heels of the snow came a frost that put shackles on the very
wind. It fell black and sudden on the country, turning the mud floors
of the poorer dwellings into iron that rang below the heel, though the
peat-fires burned by day and night, and Loch Finne, lying flat as a
girdle from shore to shore, crisped and curdled into ice on the surface
in the space of an afternoon. A sun almost genial to look at, but with
no warmth at the heart of him, rode among the white hills that looked
doubly massive with their gullies and cornes, for ordinary black or
green, lost in the general hue, and at mid-day bands of little white
birds would move over the country from the north, flapping weakly to a
warmer clime. They might stay a little, some of them, deceived by the
hanging peat-smoke into the notion that somewhere here were warmth and
comfort; but the cold searched them to the core, and such as did not die
on the roadside took up their dismal voyaging anew.
The very deer came down from the glens--_cabarfeidh_ stags, hinds, and
prancing roes. At night we could hear them bellowing and snorting as
they went up and down the street in herds from Ben Bhrec or the barren
sides of the Black Mount and Dalness in the land of Bredalbane, seeking
the shore and the travellers’ illusion--the content that’s always to
come. In those hours, too, the owls seemed to surrender the fir-woods
and come to the junipers about the back-doors, for they keened in the
darkness, even on, woeful warders of the night, telling the constant
hours.
Twas in these bitter nights, shivering under blanket and plaid, I
thought ruefully of foreign parts, of the frequented towns I had seen
elsewhere, the cleanly paven streets, swept of snow, the sea-coal fires,
and the lanterns swinging over the crowded causeways, signs of friendly
interest and companionship. Here were we, poor peasants, in a waste of
frost and hills, cut off from the merry folks sitting by fire and flame
at ease! Even our gossiping, our _ceilidh_ in each other’s houses, was
stopped; except in the castle itself no more the song and story, the
pipe and trump.
In the morning when one ventured abroad he found the deer-slot dimpling
all the snow on the street, and down at the shore, unafeared of man,
would be solitary hinds, widows and rovers from their clans, sniffing
eagerly over to the Cowal hills. Poor beasts! poor beasts! I’ve seen
them in their madness take to the ice for it when it was little thicker
than a groat, thinking to reach the oak-woods of Ardchyline. For a time
the bay at the river mouth was full of long-tailed ducks, that at
a whistle almost came to your hand, and there too came flocks of
wild-swan, flying in wedges, trumpeting as they flew. Fierce otters
quarrelled over their eels at the mouth of the Black Burn that flows
underneath the town and out below the Tolbooth to the shore, or made the
gloaming melancholy with their doleful whistle. A roebuck in his winter
jacket of mouse-brown fur died one night at my relative’s door, and a
sea-eagle gorged himself so upon the carcass that at morning he could
not flap a wing, and fell a ready victim to a knock from my staff.
The passes to the town were head-high with drifted snow, our warders at
the heads of Aora and Shira could not themselves make out the road, and
the notion of added surety this gave us against Antrim’s Irishmen was
the only compensation for the ferocity of nature.
In three days the salt loch, in that still and ardent air, froze like
a fishpond, whereupon the oddest spectacle ever my country-side saw
was his that cared to rise at morning to see it. Stags and hinds in
tremendous herds, black cattle, too, from the hills, trotted boldly over
the ice to the other side of the loch, that in the clarity of the air
seemed but a mile off. Behind them went skulking foxes, pole-cats,
badgers, cowering hares, and bead-eyed weasels. They seemed to have
a premonition that Famine was stalking behind them, and they fled our
luckless woods and fields like rats from a sinking ship.
To Master Gordon I said one morning as we watched a company of dun
heifers mid-way on the loch, “This is an ill omen or I’m sore mistaken.”
He was not a man given to superstitions, but he could not gainsay me.
“There’s neither hip nor haw left in our woods,” he said; “birds
I’ve never known absent here in the most eager winters are gone, and
wild-eyed strangers, their like never seen here before, tamely pick
crumbs at my very door. Signs! signs! It beats me sometimes to know how
the brute scents the circumstance to come, but--whats the Word?--‘Not
a sparrow shall fall.’”
We fed well on the wild meat driven to our fireside, and to it there
never seemed any end, for new flocks took up the tale of the old ones,
and a constant procession of fur and feather moved across our white
prospect. Even the wolf--from Benderloch no doubt--came baying at night
at the empty gibbets at the town-head, that spoke of the law’s suspense.
Only in Castle Inneraora was there anything to be called gaiety.
MacCailein fumed at first at the storm that kept his letters from him
and spoiled the laburnums and elms he was coaxing to spring about his
garden; but soon he settled down to his books and papers, ever his
solace in such homely hours as the policy and travel of his life
permitted. And if the burgh was dull and dark, night after night there
was merriment over the drawbrig of the castle. It would be on the 10th
or the 15th of the month that I first sampled it I went up with a party
from the town and neighbourhood, with their wives and daughters, finding
an atmosphere wondrous different from that of the cooped and anxious
tenements down below. Big logs roared behind the fire-dogs, long candles
and plenty lit the hall, and pipe and harp went merrily. Her ladyship
had much of the French manner--a dainty dame with long thin face and
bottle shoulders, attired always in Saxon fashion, and indulgent in
what I then thought a wholesome levity, that made up for the Gruamach
husband. And she thought him, honestly, the handsomest and noblest
in the world, though she rallied him for his overmuch sobriety of
deportment. To me she was very gracious, for she had liked my mother,
and I think she planned to put me in the way of the Provost’s daughter
as often as she could.
When his lordship was in his study, our daffing was in Gaelic, for her
ladyship, though a Morton, and only learning the language, loved to have
it spoken about her. Her pleasure was to play the harp--a clarsach of
great beauty, with Iona carving on it--to the singing of her daughter
Jean, who knew all the songs of the mountains and sang them like the
bird. The town girls, too, sang, Betty a little shyly, but as daintily
as her neighbours, and we danced a reel or two to the playing of Paruig
Dall, the blind piper. Venison and wine were on the board, and whiter
bread than the town baxters afforded. It all comes back on me now--that
lofty hall, the skins of seal and otter and of stag upon the floor, the
flaring candles and the glint of glass and silver, the banners swinging
upon the walls over devices of pike, gun, and claymore--the same to be
used so soon!
The castle, unlike its successor, sat adjacent to the river-side, its
front to the hill of Dunchuach on the north, and its back a stone-cast
from the mercat cross and the throng street of the town. Between it and
the river was the small garden consecrate to her ladyship’s flowers, a
patch of level soil, cut in dice by paths whose tiny pebbles and broken
shells crunched beneath the foot at any other season than now when the
snow covered all.
John Splendid, who was of our party, in a lull of the entertainment was
looking out at the prospect from a window at the gable end of the
hall, for the moon sailed high above Strone, and the outside world was
beautiful in a cold and eerie fashion. Of a sudden he faced round and
beckoned to me with a hardly noticeable toss of the head.
I went over and stood beside him. He was bending a little to get the top
of Dunchuach in the field of his vision, and there was a puzzled look on
his face.
“Do you see any light up yonder?” he asked, and I followed his query
with a keen scrutiny of the summit, where the fort should be lying in
darkness and peace.
There was a twinkle of light that would have shown fuller if the
moonlight were less.
“I see a spark,” I said, wondering a little at his interest in so small
an affair.
“That’s a pity,” said he, in a rueful key. “I was hoping it might be a
private vision of my own, and yet I might have known my dream last night
of a white rat meant something. If that’s flame there’s more to follow.
There should be no lowe on this side of the fort after nightfall, unless
the warders on the other side have news from the hills behind Dunchuach.
In this matter of fire at night Dunchuach echoes Ben Bhuidhe or Ben
Bhrec, and these two in their turn carry on the light of our friends
farther ben in Bredalbane and Cruachan. It’s not a state secret to tell
you we were half feared some of our Antrim gentry might give us a call;
but the Worst Curse on the pigs who come guesting in such weather!”
He was glowering almost feverishly at the hill-top, and I turned round
to see that the busy room had no share in our apprehension. The only
eyes I found looking in our direction were those of Betty, who finding
herself observed, came over, blushing a little, and looked out into the
night.
“You were hiding the moonlight from me,” she said with a smile, a remark
which struck me as curious, for she could not, from where she sat, see
out at the window.
“I never saw one who needed it less,” said Splendid, and still he looked
intently at the mount. “You carry your own with you.”
Having no need to bend, she saw the top of Dun-chuach whenever she got
close to the window, and by this time the light on it looked like a
planet, wan in the moonlight, but unusually large and angry.
“I never saw star so bright,” said the girl, in a natural enough error.
“A challenge to your eyes, madam,” retorted Splendid again, in a
raillery wonderful considering his anxiety, and he whispered in my
ear--“or to us to war.”
As he spoke, the report of a big gun boomed through the frosty air from
Dunchuach to the plain, and the beacon flashed up, tall, flaunting, and
unmistakable.
John Splendid turned into the hall and raised his voice a little, to say
with no evidence of disturbance--
“There’s something amiss up the glens, your ladyship.”
The harp her ladyship strummed idly on at the moment had stopped on a
ludicrous and unfinished note, the hum of conversation ended abruptly.
Up to the window the company crowded, and they could see the balefire
blazing hotly against the cool light of the moon and the widely
sprinkled stars. Behind them in a little came Argile, one arm only
thrust hurriedly in a velvet jacket, his hair in a disorder, the pallor
of study on his cheek. He very gently pressed to the front, and looked
out with a lowering brow at the signal.
“Ay, ay!” he said in the English, after a pause that kept the room more
intent on his face than on the balefire. “My old luck bides with me.
I thought the weather guaranteed me a season’s rest, but here’s the
claymore again! Alasdair, Craignish, Sir Donald, I wish you gentlemen
would set the summons about with as little delay as need be. We have
no time for any display of militant science, but as these beacons carry
their tale fast we may easily be at the head of Glen Aora before the
enemy is down Glenurchy.”
Sir Donald, who was the eldest of the officers his lordship addressed,
promised a muster of five hundred men in three hours’ time. “I can have
a _crois-tara_,” he said, “at the very head of Glen Shira in an hour.”
“You may save yourself the trouble,” said John Splendid; “Glen Shira’s
awake by this time, for the watchers have been in the hut on Ben Bhuidhe
since ever we came back from Lorn, and they are in league with other
watchers at the Gearron town, who will have the alarm miles up the Glen
by now if I make no mistake about the breed.”
By this time a servant came in to say Sithean Sluaidhe hill on Cowal was
ablaze, and likewise the hill of Ardno above the Ardkinglas lands.
“The alarm will be over Argile in two hours,” said his lordship. “We’re
grand at the beginnings of things,” and as he spoke he was pouring, with
a steady hand, a glass of wine for a woman in the tremors. “I wish to
God we were better at the endings,” he added, bitterly. “If these Athole
and Antrim caterans have the secret of our passes, we may be rats in a
trap before the morn’s morning.”
The hall emptied quickly, a commotion of folks departing rose in the
courtyard, and candle and torch moved about. Horses put over the bridge
at a gallop, striking sparks from the cobble-stones, swords jingled on
stirrups. In the town, a piper’s tune hurriedly lifted, and numerous
lights danced to the windows of the burghers. John Splendid, the
Marquis, and I were the only ones left in the hall, and the Marquis
turned to me with a smile--
“You see your pledge calls for redemption sooner than you expected,
Elrigmore. The enemy’s not far from Ben Bhuidhe now, and your sword is
mine by the contract.”
“Your lordship can count on me to the last ditch,” I cried; and indeed I
might well be ready, for was not the menace of war as muckle against my
own hearth as against his?
“Our plan,” he went on, “as agreed upon at a council after my return
from the north, was to hold all above Inneraora in simple defence while
lowland troops took the invader behind. Montrose or the Mac Donalds
can’t get through our passes.”
“I’m not cock-sure of that, MacCailein,” said Splendid. “We’re here in
the bottom of an ashet; there’s more than one deserter from your tartan
on the outside of it, and once they get on the rim they have, by all
rules strategic, the upper hand of us in some degree. I never had much
faith (if I dare make so free) in the surety of our retreat here. It’s
an old notion of our grandads that we could bar the passes.”
“So we can, sir, so we can!” said the Marquis, nervously picking at his
buttons with his long white fingers, the nails vexatiously polished and
shaped.
“Against horse and artillery, I allow, surely not against Gaelic foot.
This is not a wee foray of broken men, but an attack by an army of
numbers. The science of war--what little I learned of it in the Low
Countries with gentlemen esteemed my betters--convinces me that if a big
enough horde fall on from the rim of our ashet, as I call it, they might
sweep us into the loch like rattons.”
I doubt MacCailein Mor heard little of this uncheery criticism, for he
was looking in a seeming blank abstraction out of the end window at the
town lights increasing in number as the minutes passed. His own piper in
the close behind the buttery had tuned up and into the gathering--
“Bha mi air banais ‘am bail’ Inneraora. Banais bu mhiosa bha riamh air
an t-saoghal!”
I felt the tune stir me to the core, and M’Iver, I could see by the
twitch of his face, kindled to the old call.
“Curse them!” cried MacCailein; “Curse them!” he cried in the Gaelic,
and he shook a white fist foolishly at the north; “I’m wanting but peace
and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be
snapping like curs at Argile. God’s name! and I’ll crush them like ants
on the ant-heap.”
From the door at the end of the room, as he stormed, a little bairn
toddled in, wearing a night-shirt, a curly gold-haired boy with his
cheeks like the apple for hue, the sleep he had risen from still heavy
on his eyes. Seemingly the commotion had brought him from his bed, and
up he now ran, and his little arms went round his father’s knees. On
my word I’ve seldom seen a man more vastly moved than was Archibald,
Marquis of Argile. He swallowed his spittle as if it were wool, and took
the child to his arms awkwardly, like one who has none of the handling
of his own till they are grown up, and I could see the tear at the cheek
he laid against the youth’s ruddy hair.
“Wild men coming!” said the child, not much put about after all.
“They shan’t touch my little Illeasbuig,” whispered his lordship,
kissing him on the mouth. Then he lifted his head and looked hard at
John Splendid. “I think,” he said, “if I went post-haste to Edinburgh,
I could be of some service in advising the nature and route of the
harassing on the rear of Montrose. Or do you think--do you think----?”
He ended in a hesitancy, flushing a little at the brow, his lips
weakening at the corner.
John Splendid, at my side, gave me with his knee the least nudge on the
leg next him.
“Did your lordship think of going to Edinburgh at once?” he asked, with
an odd tone in his voice, and keeping his eyes very fixedly on a window.
“If it was judicious, the sooner the better,” said the Marquis, nuzzling
his face in the soft warmth of the child’s neck.
Splendid looked helpless for a bit, and then took up the policy that
I learned later to expect from him in every similar case. He seemed to
read (in truth it was easy enough!) what was in his master’s mind, and
he said, almost with gaiety--
“The best thing you could do, my lord. Beyond your personal
encouragement (and a Chiefs aye a consoling influence on the field, I’ll
never deny), there’s little you could do here that cannot, with your
pardon, be fairly well done by Sir Donald and myself, and Elrigmore
here, who have made what you might call a trade of tulzie and brulzie.”
MacCailein Mor looked uneasy for all this open assurance. He set the
child down with an awkward kiss, to be taken away by a servant lass who
had come after him.
“Would it not look a little odd!” he said, eyeing us keenly.
“Your lordship might be sending a trusty message to Edinburgh,” I said;
and John Splendid with a “Pshaw!” walked to the window, saying what he
had to say with his back to the candle-light.
“There’s not a man out there but would botch the whole business if you
sent him,” he said; “it must be his lordship or nobody. And what’s to
hinder her ladyship and the children going too? Snugger they’d be by far
in Stirling Lodge than here, I’ll warrant. If I were not an old runt
of a bachelor, it would be my first thought to give my women and bairns
safety.”
MacCailein flew at the notion. “Just so, just so,” he cried, and of a
sudden he skipped out of the room.
John Splendid turned, pushed the door to after the nobleman, and in a
soft voice broke into the most terrible torrent of bad language ever I
heard (and I’ve known cavaliers of fortune free that way). He called his
Marquis everything but a man.
“Then why in the name of God do you urge him on to a course that a fool
could read the poltroonery of? I never gave MacCailein Mor credit for
being a coward before,” said I.
“Coward!” cried Splendid. “It’s no cowardice but selfishness--the
disease, more or less, of us all. Do you think yon gentleman a coward?
Then you do not know the man. I saw him once, empty-handed, in the
forest, face the white stag and beat it off a hunter it was goring to
death, and they say he never blenched when the bonnet was shot off his
head at Drimtyne, but jested with a ‘Close on’t: a nail-breadth more,
and Colin was heir to an earlhood!’”
“I’m sorry to think the worst of an Argile and a Campbell, but surely
his place is here now.”
“It is, I admit; and I egged him to follow his inclination because I’m
a fool in one thing, as you’ll discover anon, because ifs easier and
pleasanter to convince a man to do what he wants to do than to convince
him the way he would avoid is the only right one.”
“It’s not an altogether nice quirk of the character,” I said, drily. It
gave me something of a stroke to find so weak a bit in a man of so many
notable parts.
He spunked up like tinder.
“Do you call me a liar?” he said, with a face as white as a clout, his
nostrils stretching in his rage.
“Liar!” said I, “not I. It would be an ill time to do it with our common
enemy at the door. A lie (as I take it in my own Highland fashion) is
the untruth told for cowardice or to get a mean advantage of another:
your way with MacCailein was but a foolish way (also Highland, I’ve
noticed) of saving yourself the trouble of spurring up your manhood to
put him in the right.”
“You do me less than half justice,” said Splendid, the blood coming back
to his face, and him smiling again; “I allow I’m no preacher. If a
man must to hell, he must, his own gait. The only way I can get into
argument with him about the business is to fly in a fury. If I let my
temper up I would call MacCailein coward to his teeth, though I know
it’s not his character. But I’ve been in a temper with my cousin before
now, and I ken the stuff he’s made of: he gets as cold as steel the
hotter I get, and with the poorest of causes he could then put me in a
black confusion----”
“But you----”
“Stop, stop! let me finish my tale. Do you know, I put a fair face on
the black business to save the man his own self-respect. He’ll know
himself his going looks bad without my telling him, and I would at least
leave him the notion that we were blind to his weakness. After all
it’s not much of a weakness--the wish to save a wife and children from
danger. Another bookish disease, I admit: their over-much study has
deadened the man to a sense of the becoming, and in an affair demanding
courage he acts like a woman, thinking of his household when he should
be thinking of his clan. My only consolation is that after all (except
for the look of the thing) his leaving us matters little.”
I thought different on that point, and I proved right. If it takes short
time to send a fiery cross about, it takes shorter yet to send a naughty
rumour, and the story that MacCailein Mor and his folks were off in a
hurry to the Lowlands was round the greater part of Argile before the
clansmen mustered at Inneraora. They never mustered at all, indeed, for
the chieftains of the small companies that came from Glen Finne and down
the country no sooner heard that the Marquis was off than they took the
road back, and so Montrose and Colkitto MacDonald found a poltroon and
deserted countryside waiting them.