He was a lantern-jawed, sallow-faced, high-browed fellow in his prime,
with the merest hint of a hirple or halt in his walk, very shabby in his
dress, wearing no sporran, but with a dagger bobbing about at his groin.
I have never seen a man with surprise more sharply stamped on his visage
than was betrayed by this one when he got close upon us and found two of
a clan so unlikely to have stray members out for a careless airing on a
forenoon in Badenoch.
“You’re taking your walk?” he said, with a bantering tone, after a
moment’s pause.
“You couldn’t have guessed better,” said John. “We are taking all we’re
likely to get in so barren a country.”
The stranger chuckled sourly as the three of us stood in a group
surveying each other. “My name,” said he, in his odd north Gaelic, and
throwing out his narrow chest, “is John MacDonad I’m Keppoch’s bard, and
I’ve no doubt you have heard many of my songs. I’m namely in the world
for the best songs wit ever strung together. Are you for war? I can stir
you with a stave to set your sinews straining. Are you for the music of
the wood? The thrush itself would be jealous of my note. Are you for the
ditty of the lover? Here’s the songster to break hearts. Since the start
of time there have been ‘prentices at my trade: I have challenged North
and East, South and the isle-flecked sea, and they cry me back their
master.”
M’Iver put a toe on one of mine, and said he, “Amn’t I the unlucky man,
for I never heard of you?”
“Tut, tut,” cried the bard in a fret, “perhaps you think so much in
Argile of your hedge-chanters that you give the lark of the air no ear.”
“We have so many poets between Knapdale and Cruachan,” said John, “that
the business is fallen out of repute, and men brag when they can make an
honest living at prose.”
“Honest living,” said the bard, “would be the last thing I would expect
Clan Campbell to brag of.”
He was still in an annoyance at the set-back to his vanity, shuffling
his feet restlessly on the ground, and ill at ease about the mouth,
that I’ve noticed is the first feature to show a wound to the conceit.
“Come, come,” he went on, “will you dare tell me that the sheiling
singers on Loch Finneside have never heard my ‘Harp of the Trees’? If
there’s a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I’ve yet to learn it.”
“If I heard it,” said John, “I’ve forgotten it.”
“Name of God!” cried the bard in amaze, “you couldn’t; it goes so”--and
he hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had been
singing some years before.
We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain of
it, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of his
budget--some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knew
by fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh--but to each
and all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance.
“No doubt,” said he, “they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, but
Argile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for a
living but string rhymes?”
The bard was in a sweat of vexation. “I’ve wandered far,” said he, “and
you beat all I met in a multitude of people. Do you think the stringing
of rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the field
and the wood between his _duans_?”
“I think,” said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestness
was in his utterance)--“I think his songs would be all the better for
some such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt the
blood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at the
pit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of a
desolate home? Love,--sir, you are young, young------”
“Thanks be with you,” said the bard; “your last word gives me the clue
to my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in the
actual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errant
freaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, with
a bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned the
splendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wring
my heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have made
in my country could confer.”
I’m afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of his
eye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervous
man, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as well
could be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowl
on its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.
“John Lorn, John Lom!” I cried, “I heard a soldier sing your songs in
the ship Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore.”
He turned with a grateful eye from M’Iver to me, and I felt that I had
one friend now in Badenoch.
“Do you tell me?” he asked, a very child in his pleasure, that John
Splendid told me after he had not the heart to mar. “Which one did they
sing--‘The Harp of the Trees’ or ‘Macrannul Og’s Lament’? I am sure it
would be the Lament: it is touched with the sorrow of the starless
night on a rain-drummed, wailing sea. Or perhaps they knew--the gentle
hearts--my ‘Farewell to the Fisher.’ I made it with yon tremor of joy,
and it is telling of the far isles beyond Uist and Barra, and the Seven
Hunters, and the white sands of Colomkill.”
M’Iver sat down on the wayside and whittled a stick with a pretence at
patience I knew he could scarcely feel, for we were fools to be dallying
thus on the way in broad morning when we should be harking back to our
friends as secretly as the fox.
“Were you on the ocean?” he asked the bard, whose rapture was not
abated.
“Never,” said he, “but I know Linnhe and Loch Eil and the fringe of
Morar.”
“Mere dubs,” said M’Iver, pleasantly--“mere dubs or ditches. Now I,
Barbreck, have been upon the deeps, tossed for days at hazard without a
headland to the view. I may have made verse on the experience,--I’ll not
say yea or nay to that,--but I never gave a lochan credit for washing
the bulged sides of the world.”
“You hadn’t fancy for it, my good fellow,” said the bard, angry again.
“I forgot to say that I saw Loch Finne too, and the Galley of Lorn
taking MacCailein off from his castle. I’m making a song on that now.”
“Touched!” thinks I, for it was a rapier-point at my comrade’s very
marrow. He reddened at once, pulled down his brows, and scanned the bard
of Keppoch, who showed his knowledge of his advantage.
“If I were you,” said John in a little, “I would not put the finish on
that ditty till I learned the end of the transaction. Perhaps MacCailein
(and God bless my chief!) is closer on Lochiel and Lochaber to-day than
you give him credit for.”
“Say nothing about that,” said I warningly in English to my friend,
never knowing (what I learned on a later occasion) that John Lorn had
the language as well as myself.
“When MacCailein comes here,” said the bard, “he’ll get a Badenoch
welcome.”
“And that is the thief’s welcome, the shirt off his very back,” cried
M’Iver.
“Off his back very likely,” said the bard; “it’s the back we see
oftenest of the bonny gentleman.”
M’Iver grew livid to the very lip, and sprang to his feet, dutching
with great menace the black knife he had been whittling with. Not a bit
abashed, the bard pulled out his dirk, and there was like to be a pretty
to-do when I put between them.
The issue of the quarrel that thus I retarded was postponed altogether
by a circumstance that changed the whole course of our adventure in this
wild country,--severed us at a sharp wrench from the Campbell regiments,
and gave us the chance--very unwelcome it was--of beholding the manner
of war followed by Alasdair MacDonald’s savage tribes. It happened in a
flash, without warning. No blow had been struck by the two gentlemen
at variance, when we were all three thrown to the ground, and the bound
prisoners of a squad of Macgregors who had got out of the thicket and
round us unobserved in the heat of the argument.
They treated us all alike--the bard as curt as the Campbells, in spite
of his tartan,--and without exchanging any words with us marched us
before them on a journey of several hours to Kilcumin.
Long or ever we reached Kilcumin we were manifestly in the neighbourhood
of Montrose’s force. His pickets held the road; the hillsides moved with
his scouts. On a plain called Leiter-nan-lub the battalion lay camped, a
mere fragment of the force that brought ruin to Argile: Athol men under
the Tutor of Struan, Stewarts of Appin, Maclans of Glencoe, a few of the
more sedate men of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Maclean, as well as a handful
of the Gregaraich who had captured us. It was the nightfall when we were
turned into the presence of Sir Alasdair, who was sitting under a few
ells of canvas playing cartes with some chieftains by the light of a
fir-root fire.
“Whom have we here?” said he, never stopping for more than a glimpse of
us.
“Two Campbells and a man who says he’s bard of Keppoch,” he was told.
“A spy in an honest tartan, no doubt,” said Sir Alas-dair; “but well put
it to the test with Keppoch himself: tell him to come over and throw an
eye on the fellow.”
Keppoch was sent for, and came across from a fire at another part of the
field, a hiccough at his throat and a blear look in his eye as one that
has been overly brisk with the bottle, but still and on the gentleman
and in a very good humour.
“Here’s my bard sure enough!” he cried. “John, John, what do you seek in
Kilcumin, and in Campbell company too?”
“The company is none of my seeking,” said John Lorn, very short and
blunt “And we’re like to have a good deal more of the same clan’s
company than we want before long, for Argile and his clan to three times
your number are at Inverlochy. I have tramped a weary day to tell you
the tale, and I get but a spy’s reception.”
The tale went round the camp in the time a man would whistle an air. Up
came Montrose on the instant, and he was the first to give us a
civil look. But for him we had no doubt got a short quittance from
MacColkitto, who was for the tow gravatte on the spot Instead we
were put on parole when his lordship learned we had been Cavaliers of
fortune. The moon rose with every sign of storm, the mountains lay about
white to their foundations, and ardent winds belched from the glens, but
by mountain and glen Mac Donald determined to get round on the flank of
Argile.