We made good speed up the burn-side, through the fields, and into the
finest forest that was (or is to this day, perhaps) in all the wide
Highlands. I speak of Creag Dubh, great land of majestic trees, home
of the red-deer, rich with glades carpeted with the juiciest grass, and
endowed with a cave or two where we knew we were safe of a sanctuary if
it came to the worst, and the Athole men ran at our heels. It welcomed
us from the rumour of battle with a most salving peace. Under the high
fir and oak we walked in a still and scented air, aisles lay about and
deep recesses, the wind sang in the tops and in the vistas of the trees,
so that it minded one of Catholic kirks frequented otherwhere. We sped
up by the quarries and through Eas-a-chosain (that little glen so full
of fondest memorials for all that have loved and wandered), and found
our first resting-place in a cunning little hold on an eminence looking
down on the road that ran from the town to Coillebhraid mines. Below us
the hillside dipped three or four hundred feet in a sharp slant bushed
over with young _darach_ wood; behind us hung a tremendous rock that few
standing upon would think had a hollow heart Here was our refuge, and
the dry and stoury alleys of the fir-wood we had traversed gave no clue
of our track to them that might hunt us.
We made a fire whose smoke curled out at the back of the cave into a
linn at the bottom of a fall the Cromalt burn has here, and had there
been any to see the reek they would have thought it but the finer spray
of the thawed water rising among the melting ice-lances. We made, too,
couches of fir-branches--the springiest and most wholesome of beds in
lieu of heather or gall, and laid down our weariness as a soldier would
relinquish his knapsack, after John Splendid had bandaged my wounded
shoulder.
In the cave of Eas-a-chosain we lay for more days than I kept count
of, I immovable, fevered with my wound, Sir Donald my nurse, and John
Splendid my provider. They kept keen scrutiny on the road below, where
sometimes they could see the invaders passing in bands in their search
for scattered townships or crofts.
On the second night John ventured into the edge of the town to see how
fared Inneraora and to seek provand. He found the place like a fiery
cross,--burned to char at the ends, and only the mid of it--the solid
Tolbooth and the gentle houses--left to hint its ancient pregnancy. A
corps of Irish had it in charge while their comrades scoured the rest of
the country, and in the dusk John had an easy task to find brandy in the
cellars of Craig-nure (the invaders never thought of seeking a cellar
for anything more warming than peats), a boll of meal in handfuls here
and there among the meal-girnels of the commoner houses that lay open to
the night, smelling of stale hearth-fires, and harried.
To get fresh meat was a matter even easier, though our guns we dare
not be using, for there were blue hares to snare, and they who have not
taken fingers to a roasted haunch of badger harried out of his hiding
with a club have fine feeding yet to try. The good Gaelic soldier will
eat, sweetly, crowdy made in his brogue--how much better off were we
with the stout and well-fired oaten cakes that this Highland gentleman
made on the flagstone in front of our cave-fire!
Never had a wounded warrior a more rapid healing than I. “_Ruigidh an
ro-ghiullach air an ro-ghalar_”--good nursing will overcome the worst
disease, as our antique proverb says, and I had the best of nursing and
but a baggage-master’s wound after all. By the second week I was hale
and hearty. We were not uncomfortable in our forest sanctuary; we were
well warmed by the perfumed roots of the candle-fir; John Splendid’s
foraging was richer than we had on many a campaign, and a pack of cartes
lent some solace to the heaviest of our hours. To our imprisonment
we brought even a touch of scholarship. Sir Donald was a student of
Edinburgh College--a Master of Arts--learned in the moral philosophies,
and he and I discoursed most gravely of many things that had small
harmony with our situation in that savage foe-haunted countryside.
To these, our learned discourses, John Splendid would listen with
an impatient tolerance, finding in the most shrewd saying of the old
scholars we dealt with but a paraphrase of some Gaelic proverb or the
roundabout expression of his own views on life and mankind.
“Tuts! tuts!” he would cry, “I think the dissensions of you two are but
one more proof of the folly of book-learning. Your minds are not your
own, but the patches of other people’s bookish duds. A keen eye, a
custom of puzzling everything to its cause, a trick of balancing the
different motives of the human heart, get John M’Iver as close on the
bone when it comes to the bit. Every one of the scholars you are talking
of had but my own chance (maybe less, for who sees more than a Cavalier
of fortune?) of witnessing the real true facts of life. Did they live
to-day poor and hardy, biting short at an oaten bannock to make it go
the farther, to-morrow gorging on fat venison and red rich wine? Did
they parley with cunning lawyers, cajole the boor, act the valorous on
a misgiving heart, guess at the thought of man or woman oftener than
we do? Did ever you find two of them agree on the finer points of their
science? Never the bit!”
We forgave him his heresies for the sake of their wit, that I but poorly
chronicle, and he sang us wonderful Gaelic songs that had all of that
same wisdom he bragged of--no worse, I’ll allow, than the wisdom of
print; not all love-songs, laments, or such naughty ballads as you will
hear to-day, but the poetry of the more cunning bards. Our cavern, in
its inner recesses, filled with the low rich chiming of his voice; his
face, and hands, and whole body took part in the music. In those hours
his character borrowed just that touch of sincerity it was in want of
at ordinary times, for he was one of those who need trial and trouble to
bring out their better parts.
We might have been happy, we might have been content, living thus in
our cave the old hunter’s life; walking out at early mornings in the
adjacent parts of the wood for the wherewithal to breakfast; rounding
in the day with longer journeys in the moonlight, when the shadows were
crowded with the sounds of night bird and beast;--we might have been
happy, I say, but for thinking of our country’s tribulation. Where were
our friends and neighbours? Who were yet among the living? How fared
our kin abroad in Cowal or fled farther south to the Rock of Dunbarton?
These restless thoughts came oftener to me than to my companions, and
many an hour I spent in woeful pondering in the alleys of the wood.
At last it seemed the Irish who held the town were in a sure way to
discover our hiding if we remained any longer there. Their provender was
running low, though they had driven hundreds of head of cattle before
them down the Glens; the weather hardened to frost again, and they were
pushing deeper into the wood to seek for bestial. It was full of animals
we dare not shoot, but which they found easy to the bullet; red-deer
with horns--even at three years old--stunted to knobs by a constant life
in the shade and sequestration of the trees they threaded their lives
through, or dun-bellied fallow-deer unable to face the blasts of the
exposed hills, light-coloured yeld hinds and hornless “heaviers” (or
winterers) the size of oxen. A flock or two of wild goat, even, lingered
on the upper slopes towards Ben Bhrec, and they were down now browsing
in the ditches beside the Marriage Tree.
We could see little companies of the enemy come closer and closer on
our retreat each day--attracted up the side of the hill from the road by
birds and beast that found cover under the young oaks.
“We’ll have to be moving before long,” said Sir Donald, ruefully looking
at them one day--so close at hand that we unwittingly had our fingers
round the dirk-hilts.
He had said the true word.
It was the very next day that an Irishman, bending under a bush to lift
a hedgehog that lay sleeping its winter sleep tightly rolled up in grass
and bracken, caught sight of the narrow entrance to our cave. Our eyes
were on him at the time, and when he came closer we fell back into
the rear of our dark retreat, thinking he might not push his inquiry
further.
For once John Splendid’s cunning forsook him in the most ludicrous way.
“I could have stabbed him where he stood,” he said afterwards, “for
I was in the shadow at his elbow;” but he forgot that the fire whose
embers glowed red within the cave would betray its occupation quite as
well as the sight of its occupants, and that we were discovered only
struck him when the man, after but one glance in, went bounding down the
hill to seek for aid in harrying this nest of ours.
It was “Bundle and Go” on the bagpipes. We hurried to the top of the
hill and along the ridge just inside the edge of the pines in the
direction of the Aora, apprehensive that at every step we should fall
upon bands of the enemy, and if we did not come upon themselves, we came
upon numerous enough signs of their employment. Little farms lay in the
heart of the forest of Creag Dubh,--or rather more on the upper edge
of it,--their fields scalloped into the wood, their hills a part of the
mountains that divide Loch Finne from Lochow. To-day their roof-trees
lay humbled on the hearth, the gable-walls stood black and eerie, with
the wind piping between the stones, the cabars or joists held charred
arms to heaven, like poor martyrs seeking mercy. Nothing in or about
these once happy homesteads, and the pertinents and pendicles near them,
had been spared by the robbers.
But we had no time for weeping over such things as we sped on our way
along the hillside for Dunchuach, the fort we knew impregnable and sure
to have safety for us if we could get through the cordon that was bound
to be round it.
It was a dull damp afternoon, an interlude in the frost, chilly and raw
in the air, the forest filled with the odours of decaying leaves and
moss. The greater part of our way lay below beechwood neither thick nor
massive, giving no protection from the rain to the soil below it, so
that we walked noisily and uncomfortably in a mash of rotten vegetation.
We were the length of the Cherry Park, moving warily, before our first
check came. Here, if possible, it were better we should leave the wood
and cut across the mouth of the Glen to Dunchuach on the other side. But
there was no cover to speak of in that case. The river Aora, plopping
and crying on its hurried way down, had to be crossed, if at all, by a
wooden bridge, cut at the parapets in the most humorous and useless way
in embrasures, every embrasure flanked by port-holes for musketry--a
laughable pretence about an edifice in itself no stronger against powder
than a child’s toy.
On the very lowest edges of the wood, in the shade of a thick plump
of beech, strewed generously about the foot by old bushes of whin
and bramble, we lay at last studying the open country before us,
and wondering how we should win across it to the friendly shelter of
Dunchuach. Smoke was rising from every chimney in the castle, which,
with its moat and guns, and its secret underground passage to the
seashore, was safe against surprises or attacks through all this
disastrous Antrim occupation. But an entrance to the castle was
beyond us; there was nothing for it but Dunchuach, and it cheered us
wonderfully too, that from the fort there floated a little stream of
domestic reek, white-blue against the leaden grey of the unsettled sky.
“Here we are, dears, and yonder would we be,” said John, digging
herb-roots with his knife and chewing them in an abstraction of hunger,
for we had been disturbed at a meal just begun to.
I could see a man here and there between us and the lime-kiln we must
pass on our way up Dunchuach. I confessed myself in as black a quandary
as ever man experienced. As for Sir Donald--good old soul!--he was now,
as always, unable to come to any conclusion except such as John Splendid
helped him to.
We lay, as I say, in the plump, each of us under his bush, and the whole
of us overhung a foot or two by a brow of land bound together by the
spreading beech-roots. To any one standing on the _bruach_ we were
invisible, but a step or two would bring him round to the foot of our
retreat and disclose the three of us.
The hours passed, with us ensconced there--every hour the length of a
day to our impatience and hunger; but still the way before was barred,
for the coming and going of people in the valley was unceasing. We had
talked at first eagerly in whispers, but at last grew tired of such
unnatural discourse, and began to sleep in snatches for sheer lack of
anything eke to do. It seemed we were prisoned there till nightfall
at least, if the Athole man who found our cave did not track us to our
hiding.
I lay on the right of my two friends, a little more awake, perhaps, than
they, and so I was the first to perceive a little shaking of the soil,
and knew that some one was coming down upon our hiding. We lay tense,
our breathing caught at the chest, imposing on ourselves a stillness
that swelled the noises of nature round about us--the wind, the river,
the distant call of the crows--to a most clamorous and appalling degree.
We could hear our visitor breathing as he moved about cautiously on the
stunted grass above us, and so certain seemed discovery that we had our
little black knives lying naked along our wrists.
The suspense parched me at the throat till I thought the rasping of
my tongue on the roof of my palate seemed like the scraping of a
heath-brush in a wooden churn. Unseen we were, we knew, but it was
patent that the man above us would be round in front of us at any
moment, and there we were to his plain eyesight! He was within three
yards of a steel death, even had he been Fin MacCoul; but the bank he
was standing on--or lying on, as we learned again--crumbled at the edge
and threw him among us in a different fashion from that we had looked
for.
My fingers were on his throat before I saw that we had for our visitor
none other than young MacLachlan.
He had his _sgian dubh_ almost at my stomach before our mutual
recognition saved the situation.
“You’re a great stranger,” said John Splendid, with a fine pretence at
more coolness than he felt, “and yet I thought Cowal side would be more
to your fancy than real Argile in this vexatious time.”
“I wish to God I was on Cowal side now!” said the lad, ruefully. “At
this minute I wouldn’t give a finger-length of the Loch Eck road for the
whole of this rich strath.”
“I don’t suppose you were forced over here,” I commented.
“As well here in one way as another,” he said “I suppose you are unaware
that Montrose and MacDonald have overrun the whole country. They have
sacked and burned the greater part of Cowal; they have gone down as far
as Knapdale. I could have been in safety with my own people (and the
bulk of your Inneraora people too) by going to Bute or Dunbarton, but I
could hardly do that with my kinsfolk still hereabouts in difficulties.”
“Where, where?” I cried; “and who do you mean?”
He coughed, in a sort of confusion, I could see, and said he spoke of
the Provost and his family.
“But the Provost’s gone, man!” said I, “and his family too.”
“My cousin Betty is not gone among them,” said he; “she’s either in
the castle yonder--and I hope to God she is--or a prisoner to the
MacDonalds, or----”
“The Worst Curse on their tribe!” cried John Splendid, in a fervour.
Betty, it seemed, from a narrative that gave me a stound of anguish, had
never managed to join her father in the boats going over to Cowal the
day the MacDonalds attacked the town. Terror had seemingly sent her,
carrying the child, away behind the town; for though her father and
others had put ashore again at the south bay, they could not see her,
and she was still unfound when the triumph of the invader made flight
needful again.
“Her father would have bided too,” said MacLachlan, “but that he had
reason to believe she found the safety of the castle. Lying off the quay
when the light was on, some of the people in the other boats saw a woman
with a burden run up the riverside to the back of the castle garden, and
there was still time to get over the draw-brig then.”
MacLachlan himself had come round by the head of the loch, and by going
through the Barrabhreac wood and over the shoulder of Duntorval, had
taken Inneraora on the rear flank. He had lived several days in a bothy
above the Beannan on High Balantyre, and, like ourselves, depended on
his foraging upon the night and the luck of the woods.
We lay among the whins and bramble undisturbed till the dusk came on.
The rain had stopped, a few stars sedately decked the sky. Bursts of
laughing, the cries of comrades, bits of song, came on the air from the
town where the Irish caroused. At last between us and Dun-chuach there
seemed to be nothing to prevent us venturing on if the bridge was clear.
“If not,” said Sir Donald, “here’s a doomed old man, for I know no
swimming.”
“There’s Edinburgh for you, and a gentleman’s education!” said John
Splendid, with a dry laugh; and he added, “But I daresay I could do the
swimming for the both of us, Sir Donald I have carried my accoutrements
dry over a German river ere now, and I think I could convey you safe
over yon bit burn even if it were not so shallow above the bridge as I
expect it is after these long frosts.”
“I would sooner force the bridge if ten men held it,” said MacLachlan.
“I have a Highland hatred of the running stream, and small notion to
sleep a night in wet tartan.”
John looked at the young fellow with a struggle for tolerance. “Well,
well,” he said; “we have all a touch of the fop in our youth.”
“True enough, you’re not so young as you were once,” put in MacLachlan,
with a sly laugh.
“I’m twenty at the heart,” cried John,--“at the heart, man,--and do my
looks make me more than twice that age? I can sing you, or run you, or
dance you. What I thought was that at your age I was dandified too about
my clothing. I’ll give you the benefit of believing that it’s not the
small discomfort of a journey in wet tartan you vex yourself over.
Have we not--we old campaigners of Lumsden’s--soaked our plaids in the
running rivers of Low Germanie, and rolled them round us at night to
make our hides the warmer, our sleep the snugger? Oh, the old days! Oh,
the stout days! God’s name, but I ken one man who wearies of these tame
and comfortable times!”
“Whether or not,” said Sir Donald, anxious to be on, “I wish the top of
Dunchuach was under our brogues.”
“_Allons, mes amis_, then,” said John, and out we set.
Out we went, and we sped swiftly down to the bridge, feeling a sense of
safety in the dark and the sound of the water that mourned in a hollow
way under the wooden cabars. There was no sentinel, and we crossed dry
and safely. On the other side, the fields, broken here and there by
dry-stone dykes, a ditch or two, and one long thicket of shrubs, rose
in a gentle ascent to the lime-kiln. We knew every foot of the way as
‘twere in our own pockets, and had small difficulty in pushing on in the
dark. The night, beyond the kiln and its foreign trees, was loud with
the call of white-horned owls, sounding so human sometimes that it sent
the heart vaulting and brought us to pause in a flurried cluster on the
path that we followed closely as it twisted up the hill.
However, we were in luck’s way for once. Never a creature challenged our
progress until we landed at the north wall of the fort, and crouching in
the rotten brake, cried, “Gate, oh!” to the occupants.
A stir got up within; a torch flared on the wall, and a voice asked our
tartan and business.
“Is that you, Para Mor?” cried John Splendid. “It’s a time for short
ceremony. Here are three or four of your closest friends terribly keen
to see the inside of a wall.”
“Barbreck, is’t?” cried Para Mor, holding the flambeau over his head
that he might look down on us.
“Who’s that with the red tartan?” he asked, speaking of MacLachlan,
whose garments shone garish in the light beside our dull Campbell
country war-cloth.
“Condemn your parley, Para Mor,” cried Sir Donald; “it’s young
MacLachlan,--open your doors!”
And the gate in a little swung on its hinges to pass us in.