At last there was but one horseman in chase of the six men who were
fleeing without a look behind them--a frenzied blackavised trooper on
a short-legged garron he rode most clumsily, with arms that swung like
wings from the shoulders, his boots keeping time to the canter with
grotesque knockings against the gaunt and sweating flanks of his
starven animal. He rode with a shout, and he rode with a fool’s want of
calculation, for he had left all support behind him and might readily
enough have been cut off by any judicious enemy in the rear. Before we
could hurry down to join the fugitives they observed for themselves that
the pursuit had declined to this solitary person, so up they drew (all
but one of them), with dirks or sgians out to give him his welcome. And
yet the dragoon put no check on his horse. The beast, in a terror at the
din of the battle, was indifferent to the rein of its master, whom it
bore with thudding hooves to a front that must certainly have appalled
him. He was a person of some pluck, or perhaps the drunkenness of terror
lent him the illusion of valour; at least, when he found a bloody end
inevitable he made the best of the occasion. Into the heaving sides of
the brute he drove desperate spurs, anew he shouted a scurrilous name
at Clan Campbell, then fired his pistol as he fell upon the enemy.
The _dag_ failed of its purpose, but the breast of the horse struck an
elderly man on the brow and threw him on his back, so that one of the
hind-hooves of the animal crushed in his skull like a hazel-nut.
Who of that fierce company brought the trooper to his end we never knew,
but when M’Iver and I got down to the level he was dead as knives could
make him, and his horse, more mad than ever, was disappearing over a
mossy moor with a sky-blue lochan in the midst of it.
Of the five Campbells three were gentlemen--Forbes the baron-bailie
of Ardkinglas, Neil Campbell in Sonachan, Lochowside, and the third no
other than Master Gordon the minister, who was the most woebegone and
crestfallen of them all. The other two were small tacksmen from the
neighbourhood of Inneraora--one Callum Mac-Iain vie Ruarie vie Allan
(who had a little want, as we say of a character, or natural, and was
ever moist with tears), and a Rob Campbell in Auchnatra, whose real name
was Stewart, but who had been in some trouble at one time in a matter
of a neighbour’s sheep on the braes of Appin, had discreetly fled that
country, and brought up a family under a borrowed name in a country that
kept him in order.
We were, without doubt, in a most desperate extremity, If we had escaped
the immediate peril of the pursuing troopers of MacDonald, we had a
longer, wearier hazard before us. Any one who knows the countryside I am
writing of, or takes a glance at my relative Neill Bane’s diagram or map
of the same, will see that we were now in the very heart of a territory
hotching (as the rough phrase goes) with clans inimical to the house
of Argile. Between us and the comparative safety of Bredalbane lay
Stewarts, MacDonalds, Macgregors, and other families less known in
history, who hated the name of MacCailein more than they feared the
wrath of God. The sight of our tartan in any one of their glens would
rouse hell in every heart about us.
Also our numbers and the vexed state of the times were against us. We
could hardly pass for peaceable drovers at such a season of the year;
we were going the wrong airt for another thing, and the fact that not
we alone but many more of Argile’s forces in retreat were fleeing home
would be widely advertised around the valleys in a very few hours after
the battle had been fought For the news of war--good or ill--passes
among the glens with a magic speed. It runs faster than the fiery cross
itself--so fast and inexplicable on any natural law, that more than
once I have been ready to believe it a witches’ premonition more than a
message carried on young men’s feet.
“But all that,” said Sonachan, a pawky, sturdy little gentleman with
a round ruddy face and a great store of genealogy that he must be
ever displaying--“But all that makes it more incumbent on us to hang
together. It may easily be a week before we get into Glenurchy; we must
travel by night and hide by day, and besides the heartening influence of
company there are sentinels to consider and the provision of our food.”
Ardkinglas, on the other hand, was a fushionless, stupid kind of man:
he was for an immediate dispersion of us all, holding that only in
individuals or in pairs was it possible for us to penetrate in safety to
real Argile.
“I’m altogether with Sonachan,” said M’Iver, “and I could mention half
a hundred soldierly reasons for the policy; but it’s enough for me that
here are seven of us, no more and no less, and with seven there should
be all the luck that’s going.”
He caught the minister’s eyes on him at this, and met them with a look
of annoyance.
“Oh yes, I know, Master Gordon, you gentlemen of the lawn bands have
no friendliness to our old Highland notions. Seven or six, it’s all the
same to you, I suppose, except in a question of merks to the stipend.”
“You’re a clever man enough, M’Iver----”
“Barbreck,” corrected my friend, punctiliously.
“Barbreck let it be then. But you are generally so sensitive to other
folk’s thoughts of you that your skin tingles to an insult no one dreamt
of paying. I make no doubt a great many of your Gaelic beliefs are sheer
paganism or Popery or relics of the same, but the charm of seven has a
Scriptural warrant that as minister of the Gospel I have some respect
for, even when twisted into a portent for a band of broken men in the
extremity of danger.”
We had to leave the dead body of our friend, killed by the horse, on the
hillside. He was a Knapdale man, a poor creature, who was as well done,
perhaps, with a world that had no great happiness left for him, for his
home had been put to the torch and his wife outraged and murdered. At as
much speed as we could command, we threaded to the south, not along the
valleys but in the braes, suffering anew the rigour of the frost and the
snow. By midday we reached the shore of Loch Leven, and it seemed as
if now our flight was hopelessly barred, for the ferry that could be
compelled to take the army of Mac-Cailein over the brackish water at
Lettermore was scarce likely to undertake the conveying back of seven
fugitives of the clan that had come so high-handedly through their
neighbourhood four days ago. On this side there was not a boat in sight;
indeed there was not a vestige on any side of human tenancy. Glencoe had
taken with him every man who could carry a pike, not to our disadvantage
perhaps, for it left the less danger of any strong attack.
On the side of the loch, when we emerged from the hills, there was a
cluster of whin-bushes spread out upon a machar of land that in a less
rigorous season of the year, by the feel of the shoe-sole, must be
velvet-piled with salty grass. It lay in the clear, grey forenoon like
a garden of fairydom to the view--the whin-bushes at a distant glance
floating on billows of snow, touched at their lee by a cheering green,
hung to the windward with the silver of the snow, and some of them even
prinked off with the gold flower that gives rise to the proverb about
kissing being out of fashion when the whin wants bloom. To come on this
silent, peaceful, magic territory, fresh out of the turmoil of a battle,
was to be in a region haunted, in the borderland of morning dreams,
where care is a vague and far-off memory, and the elements study our
desires. The lake spread out before us without a ripple, its selvedge at
the shore repeating the picture on the brae. I looked on it with a mind
peculiarly calm, rejoicing in its aspect Oh, love and the coming years,
thought I, let them be here or somewhere like it--not among the savage
of the hills, fighting, plotting, contriving; not among snow-swept
mounts and crying and wailing brooks, but by the sedate and tranquil
sea in calm weather. As we walked, my friends with furtive looks to this
side and yon, down to the shore, I kept my face to the hills of real
Argile, and my heart was full of love. I got that glimpse that comes to
most of us (had we the wit to comprehend it) of the future of my life.
I beheld in a wave of the emotion the picture of my coming years,
going down from day to day very unadventurous and calm, spent in some
peaceful valley by a lake, sitting at no rich-laden board but at bien
and happy viands with some neighbour heart A little bird of hope fluted
within me, so that I knew that if every clan in this countryside was
arraigned against me, I had the breastplate of fate on my breast “I
shall not die in this unfriendly country,” I promised myself. “There
may be terror, and there may be gloom, but I shall watch my children’s
children play upon the braes of Shira Glen.”
“You are very joco,” said John to me as I broke into a little laugh
of content with myself.
“It’s the first time you ever charged me with jocosity, John,” I said
“I’m just kind of happy thinking.”
“Yon spectacle behind us is not humorous to my notion,” said he,
“whatever it may be to yours. And perhaps the laugh may be on the other
side of your face before the night comes. We are here in a spider’s
web.”
“I cry pardon for my lightness, John,” I answered; “I’ll have time
enough to sorrow over the clan of Argile. But if you had the Sight of
your future, and it lay in other and happier scenes than these, would
you not feel something of a gaiety?”
He looked at me with an envy in every feature, from me to his
companions, from them to the country round about us, and then to himself
as to a stranger whose career was revealed in every rag of his clothing.
“So,” said he; “you are the lucky man to be of the breed of the elect
of heaven, to get what you want for the mere desire of it, and perhaps
without deserve. Here am I at my prime and over it, and no glisk of the
future before me. I must be ever stumbling on, a carouser of life in a
mirk and sodden lane.”
“You cannot know my meaning,” I cried.
“I know it fine,” said he. “You get what you want because you are the
bairn of content. And I’m but the child of hurry (it’s the true word),
and I must be seeking and I must be trying to the bitter end.”
He kicked, as he walked, at the knolls of snow in his way, and lashed at
the bushes with a hazel wand he had lifted from a tree.
“Not all I want, perhaps,” said I; “for do you know that fleeing thus
from the disgrace of my countrymen, I could surrender every sorrow and
every desire to one notion about--about--about----”
“A girl of the middle height,” said he, “and her name is----”
“Do not give it an utterance,” I cried. “I would be sorry to breathe
her name in such a degradation. Degradation indeed, and yet if I had the
certainty that I was a not altogether hopeless suitor yonder, I would
feel a conqueror greater than Hector or Gilian-of-the-Axe.”
“Ay, ay,” said John. “I would not wonder. And I’ll swear that a man
of your fate may have her if he wants her. I’ll give ye my notion of
wooing; it’s that with the woman free and the man with some style and
boldness, he may have whoever he will.”
“I would be sorry to think it,” said I; “for that might apply to suitors
at home in Inneraora as well as me.”
M’Iver laughed at the sally, and “Well, well,” said he, “we are not
going to be debating the chance of love on Leven-side, with days and
nights of slinking in the heather and the fern between us and our home.”
Though this conversation of ours may seem singularly calm and out of all
harmony with our circumstances, it is so only on paper, for in fact it
took but a minute or two of our time as we walked down among those whins
that inspired me with the peaceful premonition of the coming years. We
were walking, the seven of us, not in a compact group, but scattered,
and at the whins when we rested we sat in ones and twos behind the
bushes, with eyes cast anxiously along the shore for sign of any craft
that might take us over.
What might seem odd to any one who does not know the shrinking mood of
men broken with a touch of disgrace in their breaking, was that for long
we studiously said nothing of the horrors we had left behind us. Five
men fleeing from a disastrous field and two new out of the clutches of
a conquering foe, we were dumb or discoursed of affairs very far removed
from the reflection that we were a clan at extremities.
But we could keep up this silence of shame no longer than our running:
when we sat among the whins on Leven-side, and took a breath and
scrutinised along the coast, for sign of food or ferry, we must be
talking of what we had left behind.
Gordon told the story with a pained, constrained, and halting utterance:
of the surprise of Auchinbrcac when he heard the point of war from Nevis
Glen, and could not believe that Montrose was so near at hand; of the
waver ing Lowland wings, the slaughter of the Campbell gentlemen.
“We were in a trap,” said he, drawing with a stick on the smooth snow a
diagram of the situation. “We were between brae and water. I am no man
of war, and my heart swelled at the spectacle of the barons cut down
like nettles. And by the most foolish of tactics, surely, a good many of
our forces were on the other side of the loch.”
“That was not Auchinbreac’s doing, I’ll warrant,” said M’Iver; “he
would never have counselled a division so fatal.”
“Perhaps not,” said the cleric, drily; “but what if a general has only a
sort of savage army at his call? The gentry of your clan----”
“What about MacCailein?” I asked, wondering that there was no word of
the chief.
“Go on with your story,” said M’Iver, sharply, to the cleric.
“The gentry of your clan,” said Gordon, paying no heed to my query,
“were easy enough to guide; but yon undisciplined kerns from the hills
had no more regard for martial law than for the holy commandments. God
help them! They went their own gait, away from the main body, plundering
and robbing.”
“I would not just altogether call it plundering, nor yet robbing,” said
John, a show of annoyance on his face.
“And I don’t think myself,” said Sonachan, removing, as he spoke, from
our side, and going to join the three others, who sat apart from us a
few yards, “that it’s a gentleman’s way of speaking of the doings of
other gentlemen of the same name and tartan as ourselves.”
“Ay, ay,” said the minister, looking from one to the other of us, his
shaven jowl with lines of a most annoying pity on it--“Ay, ay,” said
he, “it would be pleasing you better, no doubt, to hint at no vice or
folly in your army; that’s the Highlands for you! I’m no Highlander,
thank God, or at least with the savage long out of me; for I’m of an
honest and orderly Lowland stock, and my trade’s the Gospel and the
truth, and the truth you’ll get from Alexander Gordon, Master of the
Arts, if you had your black joctilegs at his neck for it!”
He rose up, pursing his face, panting at the nostril, very crouse and
defiant in every way.
“Oh, you may just sit you down,” said McIver, sharply, to him. “You
can surely give us truth without stamping it down our throats with your
boots, that are not, I’ve noticed, of the smallest size.”
“I know you, sir, from boot to bonnet,” said Gordon.
“You’re well off in your acquaintance,” said M’Iver, jocularly. “I wish
I kent so good a man.”
“From boot to bonnet,” said Gordon, in no whit abashed by the irony.
“Man, do you know,” he went on, “there’s a time comes to me now when
by the grace of God I can see to one’s innermost as through a lozen. I
shudder, sometimes, at the gift. For there’s the fair face, and there’s
the smug and smiling lip, and there’s the flattery at the tongue,
and below that masked front is Beelzebub himself, meaning well
sometimes--perhaps always--but by his fall a traitor first and last.”
“God!” cried M’Iver, with a very ugly face, “that sounds awkwardly like
a roundabout way of giving me a bad character.”
“I said, sir,” answered Gordon, “that poor Beelzebub does not sometimes
ken his own trade. I have no doubt that in your heart you are touched to
the finest by love of your fellows.”
“And that’s the truth--when they are not clerics,” cried John.
“Touched to the finest, and set in a glow too, by a manly and unselfish
act, and eager to go through this world on pleasant footings with
yourself and all else.”
“Come, come,” I cried; “I know my friend well, Master Gordon. We are not
all that we might be; but I’m grateful for the luck that brought me so
good a friend as John M’Iver.”
“I never cried down his credit,” said the minister, simply.
“Your age gives you full liberty,” said John. “I would never lift a
hand.”
“The lifting of your hand,” said the cleric with a flashing eye, “is the
last issue I would take thought of. I can hold my own. You are a fair
and shining vessel (of a kind), but Beelzebub’s at your heart. They tell
me that people like you; this gentleman of Elrigmore claims you for his
comrade. Well, well, so let it be! It but shows anew the charm of the
glittering exterior: they like you for your weaknesses and not for your
strength. Do you know anything of what they call duty?”
“I have starved to the bone in Laaland without complaint, stood six
weeks on watch in Stralsund’s Franken gate, eating my meals at my post,
and John M’Iver never turned skirts on an enemy.”
“Very good, sir, very good,” said the minister; “but duty is most ill to
do when it is to be done in love and not in hate.”
“Damn all schooling!” cried John. “You’re off in the depths of it again,
and I cannot be after you. Duty is duty in love or hate, is it not?”
“It would take two or three sessions of St Andrews to show you that it
makes a great differ whether it is done in love or hate. You do your
duty by your enemy well enough, no doubt,--a barbarian of the blackest
will do no less,--but it takes the better man to do his duty sternly by
those he loves and by himself above all Argile----”
“Yes,” cried I, “what about Argile?”
The minister paid no heed to my question.
“Argile,” said he, “has been far too long flattered by you and your
like, M’Iver.”
“Barbreck,” put in my comrade.
“Barbreck be it then. A man in his position thus never learns the truth.
He sees around him but plausible faces and the truth at a cowardly
compromise. That’s the sorrow of your Highlands; it will be the black
curse of your chiefs in the day to come. As for me, I’m for duty first
and last--even if it demands me to put a rope at my brother’s neck or my
hand in the fire.”
“Maybe you are, maybe you are,” said John, “and it’s very fine of
you; and I’m not denying but I can fancy some admirable quality in the
character. But if I’m no great hand at the duty, I can swear to the
love.”
“It’s a word I hate to hear men using,” said I.
The minister relaxed to a smile at John’s amiability, and John smiled on
me.
“It’s a woman’s word, I daresay, Colin,” said he; “but there’s no
man, I’ll swear, turning it over more often in his mind than yourself.”
Where we lay, the Pap of Glencoe--Sgor-na-ciche, as they call it in
the Gaelic--loomed across Loch Leven in wisps of wind-blown grey.
Long-beaked birds came to the sand and piped a sharp and anxious note,
or chattered like children. The sea-banks floated on the water, rising
and dipping to every wave; it might well be a dream we were in on the
borderland of sleep at morning.
“What about Argile?” I asked again.
The minister said never a word. John Splendid rose to his feet, shook
the last of his annoyance from him, and cast an ardent glance to those
remote hills of Lorn.
“God’s grandeur!” said he, turning to the Gaelic it was proper to
use but sparingly before a Saxon. “Behold the unfriendliness of those
terrible mountains and ravines! I am Gaelic to the core, but give me
in this mood of mine the flat south soil and the dip of the sky round a
bannock of country. Oh, I wish I were where Aora runs! I wish I saw the
highway of Loch Firme that leads down the slope of the sea where the
towns pack close together and fires are warm!” He went on and sang a
song of the low country, its multitude of cattle, its friendly hearths,
its frequented walks of lovers in the dusk and in the spring.
Sonachan and Ardkinglas and the tacksmen came over to listen, and the
man with the want began to weep with a child’s surrender.
“And what about Argile?” said I, when the humming ceased.
“You are very keen on that bit, lad,” said the baron-bailie, smiling
spitefully with thin hard lips that revealed his teeth gleaming white
and square against the dusk of his face. “You are very keen on that bit;
you might be waiting for the rest of the minister’s story.”
“Oh,” I said, “I did not think there was any more of the minister’s tale
to come. I crave his pardon.”
“I think, too, I have not much more of a story to tell,” said the
minister, stiffly.
“And I think,” said M’Iver, in a sudden hurry to be off, “that we might
be moving from here. The head of the loch is the only way for us if we
are to be off this unwholesome countryside by the mouth of the night.”
It is likely we would have taken him at his word, and have risen and
gone on his way to the east, where the narrowing of the loch showed that
it was close on its conclusion; but the Stewart took from his knapsack
some viands that gave a frantic edge to our appetite and compelled us to
stay and eat.
The day was drawing to its close, the sun, falling behind us, was
pillowed on clouds of a rich crimson. For the first time, we noticed the
signs of the relaxation of the austere season in the return of bird and
beast to their familiar haunts. As the sun dipped the birds came out
to the brae-side to catch his last ray, as they ever love to do. Whaups
rose off the sand, and, following the gleam upon the braes, ascended
from slope to slope, and the plover followed too, dipping his feet
in the golden tide receding. On little fir-patches mounted numerous
blackcock of sheeny feather, and the owls began to hoot in the wood
beyond.