This mount of Dunchuach, on which we now found ourselves ensconced,
rises in a cone shape to a height of about eight hundred feet, its
bottom being but a matter of a quarter-mile from the castle door. It is
wooded to the very nose, almost, except for the precipitous _sgornach_
or scaur, that, seen from a distance, looks like a red wound on the face
of it The fort, a square tower of extraordinarily stout masonry, with an
eminent roof, had a sconce with escarpment round it, placed on the very
edge of the summit. Immediately behind Dunchuach is Duntorvil, its twin
peak, that, at less distance than a shout will carry, lifts a hundred
feet higher on the north. The two hills make, indeed, but one, in a
manner of talking, except for this hundred feet of a hollow worn by a
burn lost midway in long sour grasses. It had always been a surprise to
me that Argile’s grandfather, when he set the fort on the hill, chose
the lower of the two eminences, contrary to all good guidance of war.
But if he had not full domination on Dunchuach, he had, at any rate,
a fine prospect I think, in all my time, I have never witnessed a more
pleasing scene than ever presents itself in clear weather from the brow
of this peak. Loch Finne--less, as the whim of the fancy might have it,
a loch than a noble river--runs south in a placid band; the Cowal hills
rise high on the left, bare but of heather and gall; in front is the
heart of Argile, green with the forest of Creag Dubh, where the stag
bays in the gloaming. For miles behind the town and castle lies a plain,
flat and rich, growing the most lush crops. The town itself, that one
could almost throw a stone down on, looks like a child’s toy. And away
to the north and west are the abundant hills, rising higher and higher,
sprinkled here and there with spots of moor loch.
The fort this night was held by a hundred men of the body called the
Marquis his Halberdiers, a corps of antique heroes whose weapon for
ordinary was a long axe, a pretty instrument on a parade of state, but
small use, even at close quarters, with an enemy. They had skill of
artillery, however, and few of them but had a Highlander’s training in
the use of the broadsword. Besides two culverins mounted on the less
precipitous side of the hill--which was the way we came--they had
smaller firearms in galore on the sconce, and many kegs of powder
disposed in a recess or magazine at the base of the tower. To the east
of the tower itself, and within the wall of the fort (where now is but
an old haw-tree), was a governor’s house perched on the sheer lip of the
hill, so that, looking out at its window, one could spit farther than a
musket-ball would carry on the level.
We were no sooner in than MacLachlan was scenting round and into this
little house. He came out crestfallen, and went over to the group
of halberdiers, who were noisily telling their story to myself and
Splendid.
“Are no people here but men?” he asked Para Mor, who was sergeant of the
company, and to all appearance in charge of the place.
He caught me looking at him in some wonder, and felt bound, seemingly,
to explain himself.
“I had half the hope,” said he, “that my cousin had come here; but
she’ll be in the castle after all, as her father thought.”
John Splendid gave me the pucker of an eye and a line of irony about
the edge of his lips, that set my blood boiling. I was a foolish and
ungoverned creature in those days of no-grace. I cried in my English,
“One would think you had a goodman’s interest in this bit girl.”
MacLachlan leered at me with a most devilish light in his black eyes,
and said, “Well, well, I might have even more. Marriage, they say,
makes the sweetest woman wersh. But I hope you’ll not grudge me, my dear
Elrigmore, some anxiety about my own relatives.”
The fellow was right enough (that was the worst of it), for a cousin’s
a cousin in the friendly North; but I found myself for the second time
since I came home grudging him the kinship to the Provost of Inneraora’s
daughter.
That little tirravee passed, and we were soon heartily employed on a
supper that had to do duty for two meals. We took it at a rough table
in the tower, lighted by a flambeau that sent sparks flying like pigeons
into the sombre height of the building which tapered high overhead as
a lime-kiln upside down. From this retreat we could see the proof of
knavery in the villages below. Far down on Knapdale, and back in the
recesses of Lochow, were burning homes, to judge from the blotched sky.
Dunchuach had never yet been attacked, but that was an experience
expected at any hour, and its holders were ready for it They had
disposed their guns round the wall in such a way as to command the whole
gut between the hills, and consequently the path up from the glens. The
town side of the fort wall, and the east side, being on the sheer face
(almost) of the rock, called for no artillery.
It was on the morning of the second day there that our defence was put
to the test by a regiment of combined Irish and Athole men. The day was
misty, with the frost in a hesitancy, a raw gowsty air sweeping over the
hills. Para Mor, standing on the little north bastion or ravelin, as his
post of sergeant always demanded, had been crooning a ditty and carving
a scroll with his hunting-knife on a crook he would maybe use when he
got back to the tack where his home was in ashes and his cattle were far
to seek, when he heard a crackle of bushes at the edge of the wood that
almost reached the hill-top, but falls short for lack of shelter from
the sinister wind. In a second a couple of scouts in dirty red and green
tartans, with fealdags or pleatless kilts on them instead of the better
class philabeg, crept cannily out into the open, unsuspicious that their
position could be seen from the fort.
Para Mor stopped his song, projected his firelock over the wall as he
ducked his body behind it--all but an eye and shoulder--and, with a
hairy cheek against the stock, took aim at the foremost The crack of the
musket sounded odd and moist in the mist, failing away in a dismal slam
that carried but a short distance, yet it was enough to rouse Dunchuach.
We took the wall as we stood,--myself, I remember me, in my kilt, with
no jacket, and my shirt-sleeves rolled up to the shoulder; for I had
been putting the stone, a pleasant Highland pastime, with John Splendid,
who was similarly disaccoutred.
“All the better for business,” said he, though the raw wind, as we lined
the wall, cut like sharp steel.
Para Mor’s unfortunate gentleman was the only living person to see
when we looked into the gut, and he was too little that way to say much
about. Para had fired for the head, but struck lower, so that the scout
writhed to his end with a red-hot coal among his last morning’s viands.
Long after, it would come back to me, the oddity of that spectacle
in the hollow--a man in a red fealdag, with his hide-covered buckler
grotesquely flailing the grass, he, in the Gaelic custom, making a great
moan about his end, and a pair of bickering rooks cawing away heartily
as if it was no more than a sheep in the throes of braxy.
After a little the moan of the MacDonald stopped, the crows slanted down
to the loch-side, stillness came over the place. We talked in whispers,
sped about the walls on the tiptoes of our brogues, and peered
wonderingly down to the edge of the wood. Long we waited and wearily,
and by-and-by who came out high on the shoulder of Duntorvil but a band
of the enemy, marching in good order for the summit of that paramount
peak?
“I hope to God they have no large pieces with them yonder,” said John;
“for they’ll have a coign there to give us trouble if once they get
mother of muskets in train.”
But, fortunately for us, no artillery ever came to Duntorvil.
Fully two hundred of the enemy massed on the hill, commanded by a squat
officer in breeks and wearing a peruke _Anglicè_, that went oddly with
his tartan plaid. He was the master of Clanranald, we learned anon, a
cunning person, whose aim was to avail himself of the impetuousness
of the kilts he had in his corps. Gaels on the attack, as he knew, are
omnipotent as God’s thunderbolts: give them a running start at a foe,
with no waiting, and they might carry the gates of hell against the
Worst One and all his clan; on a standing defence where coolness and
discipline are wanted they have less splendid virtues. Clanranald was
well aware that to take his regiment all into the hollow where his
scout was stiffening was not only to expose them to the fire of the fort
without giving them any chance of quick reply, but to begin the siege
off anything but the bounding shoe-sole the Highlander has the natural
genius for. What he devised was to try musketry at long range (and to
shorten my tale, that failed), then charge from his summit, over the
rushy gut, and up the side of Dunchuach, disconcerting our aim and
bringing his men in on their courageous heat.
We ran back our pieces through the gorge of the bastions, wheeled them
in on the terre-plein back from the wall, and cocked them higher on
their trunnions to get them in train for the opposite peak.
“Boom!” went the first gun, and a bit of brown earth spat up to the left
of the enemy, low by a dozen paces.
A silly patter of poor musketry made answer, but their bullets might as
well have been aimed at snipe for all the difference it made to us: they
came short or spattered against our wall. We could hear the shouts of
the foe, and saw their confusion as our third gun sent its message into
the very heart of them.
Then they charged Dunchuach.
Our artillery lost its value, and we met them with fusil and caliver.
They came on in a sort of echelon of four companies, close ordered, and
not as a more skilly commander would make them, and the leading company
took the right. The rushy grass met them with a swish as they bounded
over it like roebucks, so fast that our few score of muskets made no
impression on them until they were climbing up the steep brae that led
to our walls.
Over a man in a minority, waiting, no matter how well ensconced, the
onslaught of numbers carried on the wings of hate, there comes a strange
feeling--I’ll never deny it--a sort of qualm at the pit of the stomach,
a notion to cry parley or turn a tail disgraceful. I felt it but for a
second, and then I took to my old practice of making a personal foe of
one particular man in front of me. This time I chose a lieutenant or
sergeant of the MacDonalds (by his tartan), a tall lean rascal, clean
shaved, in trews and a tight-fitting _cota gearr_ or short coat, with an
otter-skin cap on his head, the otter-tail still attached and dangling
behind like a Lowlander’s queue. He was striding along zealfully,
brandishing his sword, and disdaining even to take off his back the
bull-hide targe, though all his neighbours kept theirs in front of them
on the left arm.
“You have wrecked honest homes!” I argued with him in my mind. “You
put the torch to the widow’s thatch, you have driven the cattle from
Elrigmore, and what of a girl with dark eyes like the sloe? Fancy man,
man of my fancy! Oh! here’s the end of your journey!”
Our assailants, after their usual custom, dropped their pieces, such as
had them, when they had fired the first shot, and risked all on the push
of the target and the slash of the broad brand, confident even that our
six or seven feet of escarpment would never stay their onset any time to
speak of. An abattis or a fosse would have made this step futile; but as
things were, it was not altogether impossible that they might surmount
our low wall. Our advantage was that the terre-plein on which we stood
was three or four feet higher than they were at the outer side of the
wall, apart from the fact that they were poised precariously on a steep
brae. We leaned calmly over the wall and spat at them with pistols now
and then as they ran up the hill, with Clanranald and some captains
crying them on at the flank or middle. In the plain they left a piper
who had naturally not enough wind to keep his instrument going and face
the hill at the same time. He strode up and down in the deadliest part
of the valley where a well-sent musket ball would never lose him, and
played a tune they call “The Galley of the Waves,” a Stewart rant with
a hint of the zest of the sea in it Nobody thought of firing at him,
though his work was an encouragement to our foes, and anon the hill-tops
rang with a duel of pibrochs between him and a lad of our garrison, who
got round on the top of the wall near the governor’s house and strutted
high shouldered up and down, blasting at the good braggart air of “Baile
Inneraora.”
Those snorting, wailing, warring pipes mingled oddly with the shout of
the fighting men, who had ways of battle new to me in practice though
they were in a sense my own countrymen. Gaelic slogans and maledictions
they shouted, and when one of them fell in the mob, his immediate
comrades never failed to stop short in their charge and coolly rob him
of a silver button from his coat, or a weapon if it seemed worth while.
In a little they were soon clamouring against our wall. We laughed and
prodded them off with the long-handed axes to get free play with the
fusils, and one after another of them fell off, wounded or dead.
“This is the greatest folly ever I saw,” said Sir Donald, wiping his
brow with a bloody hand.
“I wish I was sure there was no trick in it,” said John. He was looking
around him and taking a tug at his belt, that braced him by a couple of
holes. Then he spat, for luck, on a ball he dropped into his fusil, said
a Glassary charm on it as he rammed home the charge and brought the butt
to his cheek, aiming at a white-faced Irisher with a leathern waistcoat,
who fell backward into a dub of mud and stirred no more.
“Four!” said John; “I could scarcely do better with my own French fusil
Main Og.”
The enemy drew off at a command of their captain, and into the edge of
the wood that came up on the left near our summit. We lost our interest
in them for a time, watching a man running up the little valley from the
right, above Kilmalieu. He came on waving his arms wildly and pointing
ahead; but though he was plain to our view, he was out of sight of the
enemy on the left.
A long black coat hampered his movements, and he looked gawky enough,
stumbling through the rushes.
“If I didn’t think the inside of Castle Inneraora was too snug to quit
for a deadly hillside,” said John, “I could believe yon was our friend
the English minister.”
“The English minister sure enough!” said half-a-dozen beside us.
“Here’s ill-luck for us then!” cried John, with irony. “He’ll preach us
to death: the fellow’s deadlier than the Clanranald ban ditty.”
Some one ran to the post beside the governor’s house, and let the
gentleman in when he reached it. He was panting like a winded hound, the
sweat standing in beads on his shaven jowl, and for a minute or two
he could say nothing, only pointing at the back of our fort in the
direction of the town.
“A parish visit, is it, sir?” asked John, still in his irony.
The minister sat him down on a log of wood and clutched his side, still
pointing eagerly to the south of our fort No one could understand him,
but at last he found a choked and roupy voice.
“A band behind there,” he said; “your--front--attack is--but--a--feint”
As he spoke, half-a-dozen men in a north-country tartan got on the top
of our low rear wall that we thought impregnable on the lip of the hill,
and came on us with a most ferocious uproar. “Badenoch!” they cried in
a fashion to rend the hills, and the signal (for such it was more than
slogan) brought on our other side the Clanranald gentry.
What followed in that hearthstone fight so hot and brisk took so short
a space of time, and happened in so confused and terrible a moment,
that all but my personal feeling escapes me. My every sense stirred
with something horrible--the numb sound of a musket-butt on a head,
the squeal of men wounded at the vitals, and the deeper roar of hate;
a smell of blood as I felt it when a boy holding the candle at night to
our shepherds slaughtering sheep in the barn at home; before the eyes a
red blur cleared at intervals when I rubbed the stinging sweat from my
face.
Half a hundred of those back-gait assailants were over our low wall with
their axe-hooks and ladders before we could charge and prime, engaging
us hand to hand in the cobbled square of our fort, at the tower foot.
The harassment on this new side gave the first band of the enemy the
chance to surmount our front wall, and they were not slow to take it.
Luckily our halberdiers stood firm in a mass that faced both ways,
and as luckily, we had in Master John M’Iver a general of strategy and
experience.
“Stand fast, Campbell Halberdiers!” he cried. “It’s bloody death,
whether we take it like cravens or Gaelic gentlemen!” He laid about him
with a good purpose, and whether they tried us in front or rear, the
scamps found the levelled pikes and the ready swords. Some dropped
beside, but more dropped before us, for the tod in a hole will face
twenty times what he will flee from in the open wood, but never a man
of all our striving company fought sturdier than our minister, with a
weapon snatched from an Athole man he had levelled at a first blow from
an oaken rung.
“The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!” he would cry; “for all the
kings of the Amorites that dwell in the mountains are gathered together
against us.” A slim elder man he was, ordinarily with a wan sharp face;
now it was flushed and hoved in anger, and he hissed his texts through
his teeth as he faced the dogs. Some of youth’s schooling was there, a
Lowland youth’s training with the broadsword, for he handled it like no
novice, and even M’Iver gave him “Bravo, _suas e!_”
That we held our ground was no great virtue--we could scarcely do less;
but we did more, for soon we had our enemy driven back on the walls.
They fought with a frenzy that made them ill to beat, but when a couple
of scores of our lads lined the upper wall again and kept back the leak
from that airt by the command of John Splendid, it left us the chance of
sweeping our unwelcome tenants back again on the lower wall. They stayed
stubbornly, but we had weight against them and the advantage of the
little brae, and by-and-by we pinned them, like foumarts, against the
stones. Most of them put back against the wall, and fought, even with
the pike at their vitals, slashing empty air with sword or dirk; some
got on the wall again and threw themselves over the other side, risking
the chance of an uglier death on the rocks below.
In less than an hour after the shot of Para Mor (himself a stricken
corpse now) rang over Dunchuach, our piper, with a gash on his face, was
playing some vaunting air on the walls again, and the fort was free of
the enemy, of whom the bulk had fallen back into the wood, and seemingly
set out for Inneraora.
Then we gathered and stroked our dead--twenty-and-three; we put our
wounded in the governor’s house, and gave them the rough leech-craft of
the fighting field; the dead of the assailants we threw over the rock,
and among them was a clean-shaven man in trews and a tight-fitting _cota
gearr_, who left two halves of an otter-skin cap behind him.
“I wish to God!” cried John Splendid, “that I had a drink of Altanaluinn
at this minute, or the well of Beal-loch-an-uarain.”
It was my own first thought, or something very like it, when the
fighting was over, for a most cruel thirst crisped my palate, and, as
ill luck had it, there was not a cup of water in the fort.
“I could be doing with a drop myself,” said the English minister. “I’ll
take a stoup and go down to the well yonder and fetch it.”
He spoke of the spout in the gut, a clean little well of hill-water
that, winter or summer, kept full to the lip and accessible.
We had gathered into the tower itself (all but a few sentinels), glad
for a time to escape the sight of yon shambles of friend and foe that
the battle had left us. The air had softened of a sudden from its
piercing cold to a mildness balmy by comparison; the sky had leadened
over with a menacing vapour, and over the water--in the great glen
between Ben Ime and Ardno--a mist hurried to us like driving smoke. A
few flakes of snow fell, lingering in the air as feathers from a nest in
spring.
“Here’s a friend of Argile back again,” said an old halberdier,
staunching a savage cut on his knee, and mumbling his words because he
was chewing as he spoke an herb that’s the poultice for every wound.
“Frost and snow might have been Argile’s friend when that proverb was
made,” said John Splendid, “but here are changed times; our last snow
did not keep Colkitto on the safe side of Cladich. Still, if this be
snow in earnest,” he added with a cheerier tone, “it may rid us of these
vermin, who’ll find provand iller to get every extra day they bide.
Where are you going, Master Gordon?”
“To the well,” said the minister, simply, stopping at the port, with
a wooden stoup in his hand. “Some of our friends must be burning for a
mouthful, poor dears; the wounded flesh is drouthy.”
John turned himself round on a keg he sat on, and gave a French shrug he
had picked up among foreign cavaliers.
“Put it down, sir,” he said; “there’s a wheen less precious lives in
this hold than a curate’s, and for the turn you did us in coming up to
alarm us of the rear attack, if for nothing else, I would be sorry to
see you come to any skaith. Do you not know that between us and the
well there might be death half-a-dozen times? The wood, I’ll warrant, is
hotching still with those disappointed warriors of Clanranald, who would
have no more reverence for your life than for your Geneva bands.”
“There’s no surer cure for the disease of death in a hind than for the
same murrain in a minister of the Gospel--or a landed gentleman,” said
Gordon, touched in his tone a little by the austerity of his speeches as
we heard them at the kirk-session.
John showed some confusion in his face, and the minister had his feet on
the steps before he could answer him.
“Stop, stop!” he cried. “Might I have the honour of serving the Kirk for
once? I’ll get the water from the well, minister, if you’ll go in again
and see how these poor devils of ours are thriving. I was but joking
when I hinted at the risk; our Athole gentry are, like enough, far off
by this time.”
“I liked you better when you were selfish and told the truth, than now
that you’re valiant (in a small degree) and excuse it with a lie,” quo’
the minister, and off he set.
He was beyond the wall, and stepping down the brae before we could be
out at the door to look after him.
“Damn his nipped tongue!” fumed John. “But man! there’s a lovable quirk
in his character too. I’ll give twenty pounds (Scots) to his kirk-plate
at the first chance if he wins out of this fool’s escapade of his
without injury.”
There was no doubt the minister’s task had many hazards in it, for he
carried stave nor steel as he jogged on with the stoup, over the frank
open brae-side, down to the well. Looking at him going down into the
left of the gut as unafeared as he had come up on the right of it, I
put myself in his place, and felt the skin of my back pimp-ling at the
instinct of lurking enemies.
But Gordon got safely to the well, through the snow, now falling in a
heavy shower, dipped out a stoupful, and turned about to come home. A
few yards off his path back, to the right and closer to the wood, lay
the only man of all the bodies lying in the valley who seemed to have
any life left in him. This fellow lay on his side, and was waving his
hands feverishly when the minister went up to him, and--as we saw in a
dim way through the snow--gave him a drink of the water from the lip of
the stoup.
“Sassenach fool!” said young MacLachlan, parched with thirst, gathering
in with a scooped hand the snow as it fell on the wall, and gluttonously
sucking it.
“There are many kinds of folly, man,” said I; “and I would think twice
before I would grudge a cleric’s right to give a mouthful of water to a
dying man, even if he was a Mac Donald on his way to the Pit.”
“Tuts, tuts! Elrigmore,” cried John, “let the young cock crow; he means
no more than that it’s hard to be hungry and see your brother feed a
foeman. Indeed I could be wishing myself that his reverence was the Good
Samaritan on a more fitting occasion.”
We were bandying words now, and not so closely watching our friend in
the hollow, and it was Sir Donald, standing to a side a little, who
called our attention anew, with a cry of alarm.
“Look, lads, look!” he cried, “God help Gordon!”
We looked through the snow--a grey veil--and saw two or three men fall
on the minister.
John Splendid but stopped a second to say, “It may be a feint to draw
us off the fort; bide where ye are,” and then he leaped over the wall,
armed with a claymore picked from the haunch of a halberdier beside him.
I was over at his heels, and the pair of us scoured down the brae.
There was some hazard in the enterprise; I’m ashamed to this day to tell
I thought that, at every foot of the way as we ran on. Never before
nor since have I felt a wood so sinister, so ghastly, so inspired by
dreadful airs, and when it was full on our flank, I kept my head half
turned to give an eye to where I was going and an eye to what might come
out on my rear. People tell you fear takes wings at a stern climax, that
a hot passion fills the brain with blood and the danger blurs to the
eye. It’s a theory that works but poorly on a forlorn-hope, with a
certainty that the enemy are outnumbering you on the rear. With man and
ghost, I have always felt the same: give me my back to the wall, and
I could pluck up valour enough for the occasion, but there’s a spot
between the shoulders that would be coward flesh in Hector himself.
That, I’m thinking, is what keeps some armies from turning tail to heavy
odds.
Perhaps the terror behind (John swore anon he never thought on’t till
he learned I had, and then he said he felt it worse than I) gave our
approach all the more impetuousness, for we were down in the gut before
the MacDonald loiterers (as they proved) were aware of our coming. We
must have looked unco numerous and stalwart in the driving snow, for the
scamps dashed off into the wood as might children caught in a mischief.
We let them go, and bent over our friend, lying with a very gashly look
by the body of the MacDonald, a man well up in years, now in the last
throes, a bullet-wound in his neck and the blood frothing at his mouth.
“Art hurt, sir?” asked John, bending on a knee, but the minister gave no
answer.
We turned him round and found no wound but a bruise on the head, that
showed he had been attacked with a cudgel by some camp-followers of the
enemy, who had neither swords, nor reverence for a priest who was giving
a brotherly sup to one of their own tartan. In that driving snow we
rubbed him into life again, cruelly pallid, but with no broken bit about
him.
“Where’s my stoup?” were his first words; “my poor lads upbye must be
wearying for water.” He looked pleased to see the same beside him where
he had set it down, with its water untouched, and then he cast a wae
glance on the dead man beside him.
“Poor wretch, poor wretch!” said he.
We took the stoup and our minister up to the summit, and had got him
but safely set there when he let out what gave me the route again from
Dunchuach, and led to divers circumstances that had otherwise never come
into this story if story there was, which I doubt there had never been.
Often I’ve thought me since how pregnant was that Christian act of
Gordon in giving water to a foe. Had I gone, or had John gone, for the
stoup of water, none of us, in all likelihood, had stirred a foot to
relieve yon enemy’s drouth; but he found a godly man, though an austere
one too on occasion, and paid for the cup of water with a hint in broken
English that was worth all the gold in the world to me. Gordon told us
the man’s dying confidence whenever he had come to himself a little more
in the warmth of the fort fire.
“There’s a woman and child,” said he, “in the wood of Strongara.”