I woke with a shiver at the hour before dawn, that strange hour when the
bird turns on the bough to change his dream, when the wild-cat puts out
his tongue to taste the air and curls more warmly into his own fur,
when the leaf of the willows gives a tremor in the most airless morning.
M’Iver breathed heavily beside me, rolled in his plaid to the very
nose, but the dumb cry of the day in travail called him, too, out of the
chamber of sleep, and he turned on his back with a snatch of a soldier’s
drill on his lips, but without opening his eyes.
We were on the edge of a glade of the wood, at the watershed of a small
burn that tinkled among its ice along the ridge from Tombreck, dividing
close beside us, half of it going to Shira Glen and half to Aora. The
tall trees stood over us like sentinels, coated with snow in every
bough; a cool crisp air fanned me, with a hint in it, somehow, of a
smouldering wood-fire. And I heard close at hand the call of an owl, as
like the whimper of a child as ever howlet’s vesper mocked. Then to my
other side, my plaid closer about me, and to my dreaming anew.
It was the same whimper waked me a second time, too prolonged to be an
owl’s complaint, and I sat upright to listen. It was now the break of
day. A faint grey light brooded among the tree-tops.
“John! John!” I said in my companion’s ear, shaking his shoulder.
He stood to his feet in a blink, wide awake, fumbling at his sword-belt
as a man at hurried wakings on foreign shores.
“What is it?” he asked, in a whisper.
I had no need to answer him, for anew the child’s cry rose in the
wood--sharp, petulant, hungry. It came from a thick clump of undergrowth
to the left of our night’s lodging, not sixty yards away, and in the
half-light of the morning had something of the eerie about it.
John Splendid crossed himself ere he had mind of his present creed, and
“God sain us!” he whispered; “have we here banshee or warlock!”
“I’ll warrant we have no more than what we seek,” said I, with a joyous
heart, putting my tartan about me more orderly, and running a hand
through my hair.
“I’ve heard of unco uncanny things assume a wean’s cry in a wood,” said
he, very dubious in his aspect.
I laughed at him, and “Come away, ‘_ille_,” I said; “here’s the
Provost’s daughter.” And I was hurrying in the direction of the cry.
M’Iver put a hand on my shoulder.
“Canny, man, canny; would ye enter a lady’s chamber (even the glade of
the wood) without tirling at the pin?”
We stopped, and I softly sounded my curlew-call--once, twice, thrice.
The echo of the third time had not ceased on the hill when out stepped
Betty. She looked miraculous tall and thin in the haze of the dawn,
with the aspiring firs behind her, pallid at the face, wearied in her
carriage, and torn at her kirtle by whin or thorn. The child clung at
her coats, a ruddy brat, with astonishment stilling its whimper.
For a little the girl half misdoubted us, for the wood behind us and
the still sombre west left us in a shadow, and there was a tremor in her
voice as she challenged in English--
“Is that you, Elrigmore?”
I went forward at a bound, in a stupid rapture that made her shrink in
alarm; but M’Iver lingered in the rear, with more discretion than my
relations to the girl gave occasion for.
“Friends! oh, am not I glad to see yoa?” she said simply, her wan face
lighting up. Then she sat down on a hillock and wept in her hands. I
gave her awkward comfort, my wits for once failing me, my mind in a
confusion, my hands, to my own sense, seeming large, coarse, and in the
way. Yet to have a finger on her shoulder was a thrill to the heart, to
venture a hand on her hair was a passionate indulgence.
The bairn joined in her tears till M’Iver took it in his arms. He had a
way with little ones that had much of magic in it, and soon this one was
nestling to his breast with its sobs sinking, an arm round his neck.
More at the pair of them than at me did Betty look with interest when
her tears were concluded.
“Amn’t I like myself this morning?” asked John, jocularly, dandling the
bairn in his arms.
Betty turned away without a reply, and when the child was put down and
ran to her, she scarcely glanced on it, but took it by the hand and made
to go before us, through the underwood she had come from.
“Here’s my home, gentlemen,” she said, “like the castle of Colin Dubh,
with the highest ceiling in the world and the stars for candles.”
We might have passed it a score of times in broad daylight and never
guessed its secret. It was the beildy side of the hill. Two fir-trees
had fallen at some time in the common fashion of wind-blown pines,
with their roots clean out of the earth, and raised up, so that coming
together at two edges they made two sides of a triangle. To add to its
efficiency as a hiding-place, some young firs grew at the open third
side of the triangle.
In this confined little space (secure enough from any hurried search)
there was still a _greasach_ as we call it, the ember of a fire that the
girl had kindled with a spark from a flint the night before, to warm the
child, and she had kept it at the lowest extremity short of letting
it die out altogether, lest it should reveal her whereabouts to any
searchers in the wood.
We told her our story and she told us hers. She had fled on the morning
of the attack, in the direction of the castle, but found her way cut off
by a wing of the enemy, a number of whom chased her as she ran with the
child up the river-side to the Cairnbaan, where she eluded her pursuers
among his lordship’s shrubberies, and discovered a road to the wood. For
a week she found shelter and food in a cow-herd’s abandoned bothy among
the alders of Tarra-dubh; then hunger sent her travelling again, and she
reached Leacainn Mhor, where she shared the cotter’s house with a widow
woman who went out to the burn with a kail-pot and returned no more, for
the tardy bullet found her. The murderers were ransacking the house
when Betty and the child were escaping through the byre. This place of
concealment in Strongara she sought by the advice of a Glencoe man well
up in years, who came on her suddenly, and, touched by her predicament,
told her he and his friends had so well beaten that place, it was likely
to escape further search.
“And so I am here with my charge,” said the girl, affecting a gaiety
it were hard for her to feel “I could be almost happy and content, if
I were assured my father and mother were safe, and the rest of my
kinsfolk.”
“There’s but one of them in all the countryside,” I said. “Young
MacLachlan, and he’s on Dunchuach.”
To my critical scanning her cheek gave no flag.
“Oh, my cousin!” she said. “I am pleased that he is safe, though I would
sooner hear he was in Cowal than in Campbell country.”
“He’s honoured in your interest, madam,” I could not refrain from
saying, my attempt at raillery I fear a rather forlorn one.
She flushed at this, but said never a word, only biting her nether lip
and fondling the child.
I think we put together a cautious little fire and cooked some oats from
my _dorlach_, though the ecstasy of the meeting with the girl left me
no great recollection of all that happened. But in a quiet part of the
afternoon we sat snugly in our triangle of fir roots and discoursed of
trifles that had no reasonable relation to our precarious state. Betty
had almost an easy heart, the child slept on my comrade’s plaid, and I
was content to be in her company and hear the little turns and accents
of her voice, and watch the light come and go in her face, and the smile
hover, a little wae, on her lips at some pleasant tale of Mover’s.
“How came you round about these parts?” she asked--for our brief
account of our doings held no explanation of our presence in the wood of
Strongara.
“Ask himself here,” said John, cocking a thumb over his shoulder at me;
“I have the poorest of scents on the track of a woman.”
Betty turned to me with less interest in the question than she had shown
when she addressed it first to my friend.
I told her what the Glencoe man had told the parson, and she sighed.
“Poor man!” said she, “(blessing with him!) it was he that sent me here
to Strongara, and gave me tinder and flint.”
“We could better have spared any of his friends, then,” said I. “But you
would expect some of us to come in search of you?”
“I did,” she said in a hesitancy, and crimsoning in a way that tingled
me to the heart with the thought that she meant no other than myself.
She gave a caressing touch to the head of the sleeping child, and
turned to M’Iver, who lay on his side with his head propped on an elbow,
looking out on the hill-face.
“Do you know the bairn?” she asked.
“No,” he said, with a careless look where it lay as peaceful as in a
cradle rocked by a mother’s foot.
“It’s the oe of Peggie Mhor,” she said.
“So,” said he; “poor dear!” and he turned and looked out again at the
snow.
We were, in spite of our dead Glencoe man’s assurance, in as wicked
a piece of country as well might be. No snow had fallen since we left
Tombreck, and from that dolorous ruin almost to our present retreat was
the patent track of our march.
“I’m here, and I’m making a fair show at an easy mind,” said M’I ver;
“but I’ve been in cheerier circumstances ere now.”
“So have I, for that part of it,” said Betty with spirit, half
humorously, half in an obvious punctilio.
“Mistress,” said he, sitting up gravely, “I beg your pardon. Do you
wonder if I’m not in a mood for saying dainty things? Our state’s
precarious (it’s needless to delude ourselves otherwise), and our friend
Sandy and his bloody gang may be at a javelin’s throw from us as we sit
here. I wish--”
He saw the girl’s face betray her natural alarm, and amended his words
almost too quickly for the sake of the illusion.
“Tuts, tuts!” he cried. “I forgot the wood was searched before, and
here I’m putting a dismal black face on a drab business. We might be a
thousand times worse. I might be a clay-cold corp with my last week’s
wage unspent in my sporran, as it happens to be, and here I’m to
the fore with four or five MacDonalds to my credit If I’ve lost my
mercantile office as mine-manager (curse your trades and callings!) my
sword is left me; you have equal fortune, Elrigmore; and you, Mistress
Brown, have them you love spared to you.”
Again the girl blushed most fiercely. “Thank God! Thank God!” she cried
in a stifled ecstasy, “and O! but I’m grateful.” And anew she fondled
the little bye-blow as it lay with its sunny hair on the soldier’s
plaid.
John glanced at her from the corners of his eyes with a new expression,
and asked her if she was fond of bairns.
“Need you ask that of a woman?” she said. “But for the company of this
one on my wanderings, my heart had failed me a hundred times a-day. It
was seeing him so helpless that gave me my courage: the dark at night in
the bothy and the cot and the moaning wind of this lone spot had sent me
crazy if I had not this little one’s hand in mine, and his breath in my
hair as we lay together.”
“To me,” said John, “they’re like flowers, and that’s the long and the
short of it.”
“You’re like most men, I suppose,” said Betty, archly; “fond of them in
the abstract, and with small patience for the individuals of them. This
one now--you would not take half the trouble with him I found a delight
in. But the nursing of bairns--even their own--is not a soldier’s
business.”
“No, perhaps not,” said M’Iver, surveying her gravely; “and yet I’ve
seen a soldier, a rough hired cavalier, take a wonderful degree of
trouble about a duddy little bairn of the enemy in the enemy’s country.
He was struck--as he told me after--by the look of it sitting in a scene
of carnage, orphaned without the sense of it, and he carried it before
him on the saddle for a many leagues’ march till he found a peaceful
wayside cottage, where he gave it in the charge of as honest a woman, to
all appearance, as these parts could boast He might even--for all I know
to the contrary--have fairly bought her attention for it by a season’s
paying of the kreutzers, and I know it cost him a duel with a fool who
mocked the sentiment of the deed.”
“I hope so brave and good a man was none the worse for his duel in a
cause so noble,” said the girl, softly.
“Neither greatly brave nor middling good,” said John, laughing, “at
least to my way of thinking, and I know him well. But he was no poorer
but by the kreutzers for his advocacy of an orphan bairn.”
“I think I know the man,” said I, innocently, “and his name would be
John.”
“And John or George,” said the girl, “I could love him for his story.”
M’Iver lifted a tress of the sleeping child’s hair and toyed with it
between his fingers.
“My dear, my dear!” said he; “it’s a foolish thing to judge a man’s
character by a trifle like yon: he’s a poor creature who has not his
fine impulse now and then; and the man I speak of, as like as not, was
dirling a wanton flagon (or maybe waur) ere nightfall, or slaying with
cruelty and zest the bairn’s uncles in the next walled town he came to.
At another mood he would perhaps balance this lock of hair against a
company of burghers but fighting for their own fire-end.”
“The hair is not unlike your own,” said Betty, comparing with quick eyes
the curl he held and the curls that escaped from under the edge of his
flat blue bonnet.
“May every hair of his be a candle to light him safely through a mirk
and dangerous world,” said he, and he began to whittle assiduously at a
stick, with a little black oxter-knife he lugged from his coat.
“Amen!” said the girl, bravely; “but he were better with the guidance
of a good father, and that there seems small likelihood of his
enjoying--poor thing!”
A constraint fell on us; it may have been there before, but only now I
felt it myself. I changed the conversation, thinking that perhaps
the child’s case was too delicate a subject, but unhappily made
the plundering of our glens my dolorous text, and gloom fell like a
mort-cloth on our little company. If my friend was easily uplifted, made
buoyantly cheerful by the least accident of life, he was as prone to a
hellish melancholy when fate lay low. For the rest of the afternoon he
was ever staving with a gloomy brow about the neighbourhood, keeping an
eye, as he said, to the possible chance of the enemy.
Left thus for long spaces in the company of Betty and the child, that
daffed and croodled about her, and even became warmly friendly with me
for the sake of my Paris watch and my glittering waistcoat buttons, I
made many gallant attempts to get on my old easy footing. That was the
wonder of it: when my interest in her was at the lukewarm, I could face
her repartee with as good as she gave; now that I loved her (to say the
word and be done with it), my words must be picked and chosen and
my tongue must stammer in a contemptible awkwardness. Nor was she,
apparently, quite at her ease, for when our talk came at any point too
close on her own person, she was at great pains adroitly to change it to
other directions.
I never, in all my life, saw a child so muckle made use of. It seemed,
by the most wonderful of chances, to be ever needing soothing or
scolding or kissing or running after in the snow, when I had a word to
say upon the human affections, or a compliment to pay upon some grace of
its most assiduous nurse.
“I’m afraid,” said Betty at last, “you learned some courtiers’
flatteries and coquetries in your travels. You should have taken the
lesson like your friend and fellow-cavalier M’Iver, and got the trick of
keeping a calm heart.”
“M’Iver!” I cried. “He’s an old hand at the business.”
She put her lips to the child’s neck and kissed it tumultuously.
“Not--not at the trade of lovier?” she asked after a while, carelessly
keeping up the crack.
“Oh no!” I said, laughing. “He’s a most religious man.”
“I would hardly say so much,” she answered, coldly; “for there have
been tales--some idle, some otherwise--about him, but I think his friend
should be last to hint at any scandal.”
Good heavens! here was a surprise for one who had no more notion of
traducing his friend than of miscalling the Shorter Catechism. The
charge stuck in my gizzard. I fumed and sweat, speechless at the
injustice of it, while the girl held herself more aloof than ever, busy
preparing for our evening meal.
But I had no time to put myself right in her estimate of me before
M’Iver came back from his airing with an alarming story.
“It’s time we were taking our feet from here,” he cried, running up
to us. “I’ve been up on Meall Ruadh there, and I see the whole
countryside’s in a confusion. Pipers are blowing away down the glen and
guns are firing; if it’s not a muster of the enemy preparatory to their
quitting the country, it’s a call to a more particular search in the
hills and woods. Anyway we must be bundling.”
He hurriedly stamped out the fire, that smoked a faint blue reek which
might have advertised our whereabouts, and Betty clutched the child to
her arms, her face again taking the hue of hunt and fear she wore when
we first set eyes on her in the morning.
“Where is safety?” she asked, hopelessly. “Is there a sheep-fank or
a sheiling-bothy in Argile that is not at the mercy of those
blood-hounds?”
“If it wasn’t for the snow on the ground,” said M’Iver, “I could find a
score of safe enough hidings between here and the Beannan.” “Heavens!”
he added, “when I think on it, the Beannan itself is the place for us;
it’s the one safe spot we can reach by going through the woods without
leaving any trace, if we keep under the trees and in the bed of the
burn.”
We took the bairn in turns, M’Iver and I, and the four of us set out for
the opposite side of Glenaora for the _eas_ or gully called the Beannan,
that lay out of any route likely to be followed by the enemy, whether
their object was a retreat or a hunting. But we were never to reach this
place of refuge, as it happened; for M’Iver, leading down the burn by
a yard or two, had put his foot on the path running through the pass
beside the three bridges, when he pulled back, blanching more in chagrin
than apprehension.
“Here they are,” he said “We’re too late; there’s a band of them on the
march up this way.”
At our back was the burned ruin of a house that had belonged to a
shepherd who was the first to flee to the town when the invaders came.
Its byre was almost intact, and we ran to it up the burn as fast as we
could, and concealed ourselves in the dark interior. Birds came chirping
under the eaves of thatch and by the vent-holes, and made so much
bickering to find us in their sanctuary that we feared the bye-passers,
who were within a whisper of our hiding, would be surely attracted Band
after band of the enemy passed, laden in the most extraordinary degree
with the spoil of war. They had only a rough sort of discipline in their
retirement: the captains or chieftains marched together, leaving the
companies to straggle as they might, for was not the country deserted
by every living body but themselves? In van of them they drove several
hundreds of black and red cattle, and with the aid of some rough ponies,
that pulled such sledges (called _carns_) as are used for the hauling
home of peat on hilly land, they were conveying huge quantities of
household plenishing and the merchandise of the burgh town.
Now we had more opportunity of seeing those coarse savage forces than
on any occasion since they came to Argile, for the whole of them had
mustered at Inneraora after scouring the shire, and were on their march
out of the country to the north, fatter men and better put-on than when
they came. Among them were numerous tartans, either as kilt, trews, or
plaid; the bonnet was universal, except that some of the officers wore
steel helms, with a feather tip in them, and a clan badge of heather or
whin or moss, and the dry oak-stalk whimsy of Montrose. They had
come bare-footed and bare-buttocked (many of the privates of them) to
Campbell country; now, as I say, they were very snod, the scurviest of
the knaves set up with his hosen and brogues. Sturdy and black, or lank
and white-haired like the old sea-rovers, were they, with few among them
that ever felt the razor edge, so that the hair coated them to the very
eyeholes, and they looked like wolves. The pipers, of whom there were
three, were blasting lustily at Clanranald’s march when they came up
the lower part of the Glen, according to M’Iver, who had heard them from
Meall Ruadh; but now the music was stopped, and all were intent upon
driving the cattle or watching their stolen gear’, for doubtless among
such thieves there was not as much honour as would prevent one from
picking his neighbour’s sporran.
We lay buried to the head in bracken that filled one side of the byre,
and keeked through the plenteous holes in the dry-stone wall at the
passing army. Long gaps were between the several clans, and the Irish
came last It seemed--they moved so slowly on account of the cattle--that
the end of the cavalcade was never to come; but at length came the
baggage and the staff of Montrose himself. Then I got my first look
of the man whose name stinks in the boar’s snout to this day. A fellow
about thirty-three years of age, of mid height, hair of a very dark red,
hanging in a thick fell on the shoulders of the tartan jacket (for he
wore no armour), with a keen scrutinising eye, and his beard trimmed in
the foreign vein. He sat his horse with considerable ease and grace,
and was surrounded by half-a-dozen of the chiefs who had come under his
banner. The most notable-looking of these was Alasdair MacDonald, the
Major-General, an uncouth dog, but a better general, as I learned later,
than ever God or practice made James Grahame of Montrose; with John of
Moidart, the Captain of Clanranald, Donald Glas MacRanald of Keppoch,
the laird of Glencoe, Stewart of Appin, and one of the Knoydart house,
all of whilk we distinguished by their tartans and badges.
In the mien of these savage chiefs there was great elation that Montrose
had little share in, to all appearance. He rode moodily, and when fair
opposite our place of concealment he stopped his horse as if to quit the
sell, but more likely to get, for a little, out of the immediate company
of his lawless troops. None of those home-returning Gaels paid heed
to his pause, for they were more Alasdair Macdonald’s men than his;
Mac-Donald brought them to the lair of the boar, MacDonald glutted their
Highland thirst for Campbell blood, Mac-Donald had compelled this raid
in spite of the protests of the nobleman who held the King’s Commission
and seal.
For some minutes his lordship stood alone on the pathway. The house
where we lay was but one, and the meanest, among a numerous cluster of
such drear memorials of a black business, and it was easy to believe
this generalissimo had some gloomy thoughts as he gazed on the work he
had lent consent to. He looked at the ruins and he looked up the pass at
his barbarians, and shrugged his shoulders with a contempt there was no
mistaking.
“I could bring him down like a capercailzie,” said M’Iver, coolly,
running his eye along his pistol and cocking it through his keek-hole.
“For God’s sake don’t shoot!” I said, and he laughed quietly.
“Is there anything in my general deportment, Colin, that makes ye think
me an assassin or an idiot? I never wantonly shot an unsuspecting enemy,
and I’m little likely to shoot Montrose and have a woman and bairn
suffer the worst for a stupid moment of glory.”
As ill luck would have it, the bairn, that had been playing peacefully
in the dusk, at this critical minute let up a cry Montrose plainly
heard.
“We’re lost, we’re lost,” said Betty, trembling till the crisp dry
bracken rustled about her, and she was for instant flight.
“If we’re lost, there’s a marquis will go travelling with us,” said
M’Iver, covering his lordship’s heart with his pistol.
Had Montrose given the slightest sign that he intended to call back his
men to tread out this last flicker of life in Aora Glen he would never
have died on the gibbet at the Grassmarket of Dunedin, Years after,
when Grahame met his doom (with much more courtliness and dignity than
I could have given him credit for), M’Iver would speak of his narrow
escape at the end of the raiding.
“I had his life in the crook of my finger,” he would say; “had I acted
on my first thought, Clan Campbell would never have lost Inverlochy; but
_bha e air an dàn_,--what will be will be,--and Grahame’s fate was not
in the crook of my finger, though so I might think it Aren’t we the
fools to fancy sometimes our human wills decide the course of fate, and
the conclusions of circumstances? From the beginning of time, my Lord
Marquis of Montrose was meant for the scaffold.”
Montrose, when he heard the child’s cry, only looked to either hand to
see that none of his friends heard it, and finding there was no one
near him, took off his Highland bonnet, lightly, to the house where he
jaloused there was a woman with the wean, and passed slowly on his way.
“It’s so honest an act,” said John, pulling in his pistol, “that I would
be a knave to advantage myself of the occasion.”
A generous act enough. I daresay there were few in the following of
James Grahame would have borne such a humane part at the end of a bloody
business, and I never heard our people cry down the name of Montrose
(bitter foe to me and mine) but I minded to his credit that he had a
compassionate ear for a child’s cry in the ruined hut of Aora Glen.
Montrose gave no hint to his staff of what he had heard, for when he
joined them, he nor they turned round to look behind. Before us now,
free and open, lay the way to Inneraora. We got down before the dusk
fell, and were the first of its returning inhabitants to behold what
a scandal of charred houses and robbed chests the Athole and Antrim
caterans had left us.
In the grey light the place lay tenantless and melancholy, the snow of
the silent street and lane trodden to a slush, the evening star peeping
between the black roof-timbers, the windows lozenless, the doors burned
out or hanging off their hinges. Before the better houses were piles of
goods and gear turned out on the causeway. They had been turned about by
pike-handles and trodden upon with contemptuous heels, and the pick of
the plenishing was gone. Though upon the rear of the kirk there were two
great mounds, that showed us where friend and foe had been burled, that
solemn memorial was not so poignant to the heart at the poor relics of
the homes gutted and sacked. The Provost’s tenement, of all the lesser
houses in the burgh, was the only one that stood in its outer entirety,
its arched ceils proof against the malevolent fire. Yet its windows
gaped black and empty. The tide was in close on the breast-wall behind,
and the sound of it came up and moaned in the close like the sough of a
sea-shell held against the ear.
We stood in the close, the three of us (the bairn clinging in wonder to
the girl’s gown), with never a word for a space, and that sough of the
sea was almost a coronach.