The rain that was a smirr or drizzle on the north side of Glencoe grew
to a steady shower in the valley itself, and when we had traversed a bit
in the airt of Tynree it had become a pouring torrent--slanting in our
faces with the lash of whips, streaming from the hair and crinkling
the hands, and leaving the bonnet on the head as heavy as any French
soldier’s salade. I am no great unlover of a storm in the right
circumstances. There is a long strath between Nordlingen and Donauworth
of Bavaria, where once we amazed our foreign allies by setting out, bare
to the kilt and sark, in threshing hail, running for miles in the pelt
of it out of the sheer content of encounter--and perhaps a flagon or two
of wine. It was a bravado, perhaps, but a ploy to brace the spirit; we
gathered from it some of the virtues of our simple but ample elders, who
were strong men when they lay asleep with a cheek to the naked earth and
held their faces frankly up to sun or rain. But if we rejoiced in the
rains of Bavaria, there was no cause for glee in those torrents of
Glencoe, for they made our passage through the country more difficult
and more dangerous than it was before. The snow on the ground was for
hours a slushy compost, that the foot slipped on at every step, or that
filled the brogue with a paste that nipped like brine. And when the
melting snow ran to lower levels, the soil itself, relaxing the rigour
of its frost, became as soft as butter and as unstable to the foot The
bums filled to the lip and brawled over, new waters sprung up among
the rocks and ran across our path, so that we were for ever wading and
slipping and splashing and stumbling on a route that seemed never to
come to any end or betterment.
Seven more pitiful men never trod Highlands. The first smirr soaked our
clothing; by the middle of the glen we were drenched to the hide, and
the rain was flowing from the edges of our kilts in runnels. Thus heaven
scourged us with waters till about the hour of noon, when she alternated
water with wind and gales burst from the west, the profound gorges
of Stob Dubh belching full to the throat with animus. There were
fir-plantings by the way, whose branches twanged and boomed in those
terrific blasts, that on the bare brae-side lifted up the snow with an
invisible scoop and flung it in our faces.
Stewart and the man with the want led the way, the latter ever with his
eyes red a-weeping, looking about him with starts and tremors, moaning
lamentably at every wail of wind, but pausing, now and then, to gnaw
a bone he had had enough of a thief s wit to pouch in the house of the
blind widow. Stewart, a lean wiry man, covered the way with a shepherd’s
long stride-heel and toe and the last spring from the knee-most
poverty-struck and mean in a kilt that flapped too low on his leg and
was frayed to ribbons, a man with but one wish in the world, to save his
own unworthy skin, even if every one else of our distressed corps found
a sodden and abominable death in the swamps or rocks of that doleful
valley. Then on the rear behind those commoners came the minister and
John Splendid and myself, the minister with his breeks burst at the
knees, his stockings caught up with a poor show of trimncss by a braid
of rushes, contrived by M’Iver, and his coat-skirts streaming behind
him. You could not but respect the man’s courage: many a soldier I’ve
seen on the dour hard leagues of Germanie--good soldiers too, heart and
body---collapse under hardships less severe. Gordon, with a drawn and
curd-white face, and eyes burning like lamps, surrendered his body to
his spirit, and it bore him as in a dream through wind and water, over
moor and rock, and amid the woods that now and again we had to hide in.
That we had to hide so little was one of the miracles of our traverse.
At any other time perhaps Glencoe and the regions round about it would
be as well tenanted as any low-country strath, for it abounded on either
hand with townships, with crofts that perched on brief plateaux, here
and there with black bothy-houses such as are (they say) the common
dwellings over all the Hebrid Isles. Yet, moving, not in the ultimate
hollow of the valley, but in fighting fashion upon the upper levels, we
were out of the way of molestation, and in any case it was a valley for
the time deserted of men. Women we could see in plenty, drawing water or
bearing peats in from the bogs behind their dwellings, or crossing from
house to house or toun to toun, with plaids drawn tightly over their
heads, their bodies bent to meet the blasts that made their clothing
banner and full. Nor children either were there in that most barren
country, or they kept within, sheltering the storms assailing, and the
want of them (for I have ever loved the little ones) added twenty-fold
to my abhorrence of the place.
We had to hide but rarely, I say: two or three times when down in the
valley’s depths there showed a small group of men who were going in the
same direction as ourselves by the more natural route, at a quarter of
a league’s distance in advance of us. They were moving with more speed
than we, and for a time we had the notion that they might be survivors,
like ourselves, of Argile’s clan. But at last this fancy was set at
flight by the openness of their march, as well as by their stoppage at
several houses by the way, from which they seemed to be joined by other
men, who swelled their numbers so that after a time there would be over
a score of them on the mission, whatever it might be. In that misty
rain-swept day the eye could not carry far, and no doubt they were
plainer to our view than we were to theirs among the drab vapours of
the hillside. But once or twice we thought they perceived us, for they
stopped and looked to the left and up the brae-face we were on, and then
it was we had to seek the shelter of tree or bush. If they saw us, they
seemed to suspect no evil, for they held on their way, still ahead of
us, and making for Tynree. Whoever they were, they became at last so
manifest a danger to our escape out of the head of the glen that we fell
back anew on the first plan of going through the corries on the south
side of the glen and piercing by them to Dalness. In the obscurity of a
great shower that set up a screen between us and the company marching
to Tynree, we darted down the brae, across the valley, and over to the
passage they call the Lairig Eilde, that is on the west of the great
Little Herd hill of Etive, and between it and Ben Fhada or the Long
Mount, whose peaks you will find with snow in their gullies in the
height of summer.
It was with almost a jocund heart I turned my back on Glencoe as we took
a drove-path up from the river. But I glanced with a shiver down its
terrible distance upon that nightmare of gulf and eminence, of gash, and
peaks afloat upon swirling mists. It lay, a looming terror, forgotten of
heaven and unfriendly to man (as one might readily imagine), haunted for
ever with wailing airs and rumours, ghosts calling in the deeps of dusk
and melancholy, legends of horror and remorse.
“Thank God,” said I, as we gave the last look at it--“thank God I was
not born and bred yonder. Those hills would crush my heart against my
very ribs.”
“It’s good enough for the people who are in it,” said John. “What are
they but MacDonalds? ‘Take and not give’ is their motto. They can have
Glencoe for me, with M’Millan’s right to Knapdale,--as long as wave
beats on rock.”
Master Gordon, though we had spoken in the Gaelic, half guessed our
meaning. “A black place and mournful,” said he; “but there may be love
there too and warm hearts, and soil where the truth might flourish as in
the champaign over against Gilgal beside the plains of Moreh.”
Now we were in a tract of country mournful beyond my poor description.
I know comes in Argile that whisper silken to the winds with juicy
grasses, corries where the deer love to prance deep in the cool dew, and
the beasts of far-off woods come in bands at their seasons and together
rejoice. I have seen the hunter in them and the shepherd too, coarse
men in life and occupation, come sudden among the blowing rush and
whispering reed, among the bog-flower and the cannoch, unheeding the
moor-hen and the cailzie-cock rising, or the stag of ten at pause, while
they stood, passionate adventurers in a rapture of the mind, held as it
were by the spirit of such places as they lay in a sloeberry bloom of
haze, the spirit of old good songs, the baffling surmise of the piper
and the bard. To those corries of my native place will be coming in the
yellow moon of brock and foumart--the beasts that dote on the autumn
eves--the People of Quietness; have I not seen their lanthoms and heard
their laughter in the night?--so that they must be blessed corries, so
endowed since the days when the gods dwelt in them without tartan and
spear in the years of the peace that had no beginning.
But the corries of Lorn; black night on them, and the rain rot!
They were swamps of despair as we went struggling through them. The
knife-keen rushes whipped us at the thigh, the waters bubbled in our
shoes. Round us rose the hills grey and bald, sown with boulders and
crowned with sour mists. Surely in them the sun never peeps even in the
long days of summer: the star, I’ll warrant, never rains on them his
calm influence!
Dolour left us speechless as we trudged, even when for a time we were
lost We essayed in a silence at openings here and there, at hacks and
water-currents, wandering off from each other, whistling and calling,
peering from rock-brows or spying into wounds upon the hills, so that
when we reached Dalness it was well on in the day. If in summer weather
the night crawls slowly on the Highlands, the winter brings a fast black
rider indeed. His hoofs were drumming on the hills when first we saw
sight of Dalness; he was over and beyond us when we reached the plain.
The land of Lorn was black dark to the very roots of its trees, and
the rivers and burns themselves got lost in the thick of it, and went
through the night calling from hollow to hollow to hearten each other
till the dawn.
Dalness lies in Glen Etive, at a gusset of hills on either side of which
lie paths known to the drover and the adventurer. The house receded from
the passes and lay back in a plcasance walled by whin or granite, having
a wattled gate at the entrance. When we were descending the pass we
could see a glare of light come from the place even though the mist
shrouded, and by the time we got to the gate h was apparent that the
house was lit in every chamber. The windows that pierced the tall gables
threw beams of light into the darkness, and the open door poured out
a yellow flood. At the time we came on it first we were unaware of our
propinquity to it, and this mansion looming on us suddenly through the
vapours teemed a cantrip of witchcraft, a dwelling’s ghost, grey, eerie,
full of frights, a phantom of the mind rather than a habitable home. We
paused in a dumb astonishment to look at it lying there in the darkness,
a thing so different from the barren hills and black bothies behind us.
We gathered in a cluster near the wattle gate, the minister perhaps the
only man who had the wit to acknowledge the reality of the vision.
His eyes fairly gloated on this evidence of civilised state, so much
recalling the surroundings in which he was most at home. As by an
instinct of decency, he drew up his slack hose and bound them anew with
the rushen garters, and pulled his coat-lapels straight upon his chest,
and set his dripping peruke upon his head with a touch of the dandy’s
air, all the time with his eyes on those gleaming windows, as if he
feared to relinquish the spectacle a moment, lest it should fly like a
dream.
We had thought first of pushing across the glen, over the river, through
Corrie Ghuibhasan, and into the Black Mount; but the journey in a night
like what was now fallen was not to be attempted. On the hills beyond
the river the dog-fox barked with constancy, his vixen screeching like a
child--signs of storm that no one dare gainsay. So we determined to
seek shelter and concealment somewhere in the policies of the house. But
first of all we had to find what the occasion was of this brilliancy
in Dalness, and if too many people for our safety were not in the
neighbourhood. I was sent forward to spy the place, while my companions
lay waiting below a cluster of alders.
I went into the grounds with my heart very high up on my bosom, not
much put about at any human danger, let me add, for an encounter with an
enemy of flesh and blood was a less fearsome prospect than the chance of
an encounter with more invulnerable foes, who, my skin told me, haunted
every heugh and howe of that still and sombre demesne of Dalness. But
I set my teeth tight in my resolution, and with my dirk drawn in my
hand--it was the only weapon left me--I crept over the grass from
bush to bush and tree to tree as much out of the revelation of the
window-lights as their numbers would let me.
There was not a sound in the place, and yet those lights might have
betokened a great festivity, with pipe and harp going, and dancers’ feet
thudding on the floor.
At one of the gables there was a low window, and I made for it, thinking
it a possible eye to a lobby or passage, and therefore not so hazardous
to look in at I crept up and viewed the interior.
My window, to my astonishment, looked in on no bare plain lobby, but
on a spacious salmanger or hall, very rosy with sconce-light and
wood-fire--a hall that extended the whole length of the house, with a
bye-ordinar high ceil of black oak carved very handsomely. The walls at
the far end were hung with tapestry very like MacCailein’s rooms at home
in Inneraora, and down the long sides, whose windows streamed the light
upon the hall, great stag-heads glowered with unsleeping eyes, stags of
numerous tines. The floor was strewn with the skins of the chase, and on
the centre of it was a table laden with an untouched meal, and bottles
that winked back the flicker of the candle and the hearth.
The comfort of the place, by contrast with our situation, seemed, as I
looked hungrily on it through the thick glass of the lozen, more great
and tempting than anything ever I saw abroad in the domains of princes.
Its air was charged with peace and order; the little puffs and coils and
wisps of silver-grey smoke, coming out of the fireplace into the room,
took long to swoon into nothingness in that tranquil interior.
But the most wonderful thing of all was, that though the supper seemed
ready waiting for a company, and could not have been long left, I waited
five or ten minutes with my face fast to the pane and no living footstep
entered the room. I watched the larger door near the far-off end
eagerly; it lay ajar, smiling a welcome to the parts of the house
beyond, but no one came in.
“Surely they are throng in some other wing,” I thought, “and not so
hungry as we, or their viands did not lie so long untouched in that
dainty room.”
I went round the house at its rear, feeling my way slowly among the
bushes. I looked upon parlours and bed-closets, kitchens and corridors;
they were lighted with the extravagance of a marriage-night, and
as tenantless and silent as the cells of Kilchrist The beds were
straightened out, the hearths were swept, the floors were scrubbed,
on every hand was the evidence of recent business, but the place was
relinquished to the ghosts.
How it was I cannot say, but The mystery of the house made me giddy at
the head. Yet I was bound to push my searching further, so round with a
swithering heart went Elrigmore to the very front door of the mansion
of Dalness--open, as I have said, with the light gushing lemon-yellow on
the lawn. I tapped softly, my heart this time even higher than my bosom,
with a foot back ready to retreat if answer came. Then I rasped an alarm
on the side of the yett with a noise that rang fiercely through the
place and brought the sweat to my body, but there was even then no
answer.
So in I went, the soft soles of my brogues making no sound on the
boards, but leaving the impress of my footsteps in a damp blot.
Now, to me, brought up in a Highland farm-steading (for the house of
Elrigmore is without great spaciousness or pretence), large and rambling
castles and mansions ever seem eerie. I must in them be thinking, like
any boy, of the whisperings of wraiths in their remote upper rooms;
I feel strange airs come whipping up their long or crooked lobbies at
night; the number of their doors are, to my Highland instinct, so many
unnecessary entrances for enemies and things mischancy.
But to wander over the house of Dalness, lit from tol-booth to
garret with lowe--to see the fires, not green but at their prime with
high-banked peat that as yet had not thrown an ash--to see so fine a
supper waiting in a mansion utterly desolate and its doors open to the
wilds, seemed a thing so magical that I felt like taking my feet from
the place in a hurry of hurries and fleeing with my comrades from so
unco a countryside. High and low I ranged in the interior. I had found
a nut without a kernel, and at last I stood dumfoundered and afraid,
struck solemn by the echo of my own hail as it rang unfamiliar through
the interior.
I might have been there fifteen minutes or half an hour when M’Iver,
impatient at my delay or fearing some injury to my person, came in and
joined me. He too was struck with amazement at the desertion of the
house.
He measured the candles, he scrutinised the fires, he went round the
building out and in and he could but conclude that we must be close upon
the gate when the house was abandoned.
“But why abandon it?” I asked.
“That’s the Skyeman’s puzzle; it would take seven men and seven years to
answer it,” said he. “I can only say it’s very good of them (if there’s
no ambuscade in it) to leave so fine an inn and so bonny a supper with
a bush above the door and never a bar against entrance. We’ll just take
advantage of what fortune has sent us.”
“The sooner the better,” said I, standing up to a fire that delighted
my body like a caress. “I have a trick of knowing when good fortune’s
a dream, and i’ll be awake and find myself lying on hard heather before
the bite’s at my mouth.”
M’Iver ran out and brought in our companions, none of them unwilling to
put this strange free hostel to the test for its warmth and hospitality.
We shut and barred the doors, and set ourselves down to such a cold
collation as the most fortunate of us had not tasted since the little
wars began. Between the savage and the gentleman is but a good night’s
lodging. Give the savage a peaceful hearth to sit by, a roof to his
head, and a copious well-cooked supper, and his savagery will surrender
itself to the sleek content of a Dutch merchantman. We sat at a table
whose load would have rationed a company of twice our number, and I
could see the hard look of hunting relax in the aspect of us all: the
peering, restless, sunken eyes came out of their furrowed caverns,
turned calm, full, and satisfied; the lines of the brow and mouth, the
contour of the cheek, the carriage of the head, the disposition of the
hands, altered and improved. An hour ago, when we were the sport of
ferocious nature in the heart of a country infernal, no more than one
of us would have swithered to strike a blow at a fellow-creature and to
have robbed his corpse of what it might have of food and comfort Now we
gloated in the airs benign of Dalness house, very friendly to the world
at large, the stuff that tranquil towns are made of. We had even the
minister’s blessing on our food, for Master Gordon accepted the
miracle of the open door and the vacant dwelling with John Splen-did’s
philosophy, assuring us that in doing so he did no more than he would
willingly concede any harmless body of broken men such as we were,
even his direst enemies, if extremity like ours brought them to his
neighbourhood.
“I confess I am curious to know how the thing happened, but the hand of
the Almighty’s in it anyway,” he said; and so saying he lay back in his
chair with a sigh of satisfaction that lost nothing of its zest by the
influence of the rain that blattered now in drumming violence on the
window-panes.
John Splendid, at the table-end, laughed shortly between his sups at a
flagon of wine.
“All the same,” said he, “I would advise you to put some of the
Almighty’s provand in your pouch, for fear the grace that is ours now
may be torn suddenly enough from us.”
Sonachan pointed at Stewart, who had already filled every part of his
garments with broken meat, and his wallet as well. “There’s a cautious
man,” said he, “whatever your notion of sudden ceasing may be. He has
been putting bite about in his wallet and his stomach since ever we sat
down. Appin ways, no doubt.”
“_Biadh an diugh, cogadh a maireach_--food to-day, war to-morrow,” said
the son of kings. “Royal’s my race! A man should aye be laying in as he
goes: if I had not had my wallet on Loch Leven-side, I ken some gentry
who would have been as hungry as common herds, and with nothing to help
it.”
John Splendid laughed again. “Wise man, Rob!” said he; “you learnt the
first principles of campaigning in Appin as nicely as ever I did in
the wars of the Invincible Lion (as they called him) of the North. Our
reverend comrade here, by the wisdom of his books, never questions, it
seems, that we have a lease of Dalness house as long as we like to stay
in it, its pendicles and pertinents, lofts, crofts, gardens, mills,
multures, and sequels, as the lawyers say in their damned sheep-skins,
that have been the curse of the Highlands even more than books have
been. Now I’ve had an adventure like this before. Once in Regenwalde,
between Danzig and Stettin, where we lay for two months, I spent a night
with a company of Hepburn’s blades in a castle abandoned by a cousin
of the Duke of Pomerania. Roystering dogs! Stout hearts! Where are they
now, those fine lads in corslet and morgensterne, who played havoc with
the casks in the Regenwalde cellar? Some of them died of the pest in
Schiefelbein, four of them fell under old Jock Hepburn at Frankfort, the
lave went wandering about the world, kissing and drinking, no doubt, and
lying and sorrowing and dying, and never again will we foregather in a
vacant house in foreign parts! For that is the hardship of life, that
it’s ever a flux and change. We are here to-day and away to-morrow, and
the bigger the company and the more high-hearted the merriment, the
less likely is the experience to be repeated. I’m sitting here in a
miraculous dwelling in the land of Lorn, and I have but to shut my eyes
and round about me are cavaliers of fortune at the board. I give you
the old word, Elrigmore: ‘Claymore and the Gael ‘; for the rest--pardon
me--you gentlemen are out of the ploy. I shut my eyes and I see
Fowlis and Farquhar, Mackenzie, Obisdell, Ross, the two _balbiren_ and
_stabknechten_ with their legs about the board; the wind’s howling up
from Stettin road; to-morrow we may be carrion in the ditch at Guben’s
Gate, or wounded to a death by slow degrees in night scaladoe. That
was soldiering. You fought your equals with art and science; here’s----
Well, well, God’s grace for MacCailein Mor!”
“God’s grace for us all!” said the minister.
The man with the want fell fast asleep in his chair, with his limbs
in gawky disposition. Stewart’s bullet-head, with the line of the oval
unbroken by ears, bobbed with affected eagerness to keep up with the
fast English utterance and the foreign names of M’Iver, while all the
time he was fingering some metal spoons and wondering if money was in
them and if they could be safely got to Inneraora. Sonachan and the
baron-bailie dipped their beaks in the jugs, and with lifted heads, as
fowls slocken their thirst, they let the wine slip slowly down their
throats, glucking in a gluttonous ecstasy.
“God’s grace for us all!” said the minister again, as in a benediction.
M’Iver pushed back his chair without rising, and threw a leg across its
arm with a complacent look at the shapely round of the calf, that his
hose still fitted with wonderful neatness considering the stress they
must have had from wind and rain.
“We had grace indeed,” said he, “in Pomerania. We came at night, just as
now, upon this castle of its most noble and puissant lord. It was Palm
Sunday, April the third, Old Style. I mind, because it was my birthday;
the country all about was bursting out in a most rare green; the gardens
and fields breathed sappy odours, and the birds were throng at the
Digging of their homes in bush and eave; the day sparkled, and river and
cloud too, till the spirit in a person jigged as to a fiddle; the nights
allured to escapade.”
“What was the girl’s name?” I asked M’Iver, leaning forward, finding his
story in some degree had parallel with my own.
“Her name, Colin--I did not mention the girl, did I? How did you guess
there was a girl in it?” said John, perplexed.
I flushed at my own transparency, and was glad to see that none but the
minister (and M’Iver a little later) had observed the confession of my
query. The others were too busy on carnal appetites to feel the touch of
a sentiment wrung from me by a moment’s illusion.
“It is only my joke,” I stammered; “you have a reputation among the
snoods.”
M’Iver smiled on me very warm-heartedly, yet cunningly too.
“Colin, Colin,” he cried. “Do I not know _you_ from boot to bonnet? You
think the spring seasons are never so fond and magic as when a man is
courting a girl; you are minding of some spring day of your own and a
night of twinkling stars. I’ll not deny but there was a girl in my case
in the parlour of Pomerania’s cousin at Regenwalde; and I’ll not deny
that a recollection of her endows that season with something of its
charm. We had ventured into this vacant house, as I have said: its
larders were well plenished; its vaults were full of marshalled brigades
of bottles and battaglia of casks. Thinking no danger, perhaps careless
if there was, we sat late, feasted to the full, and drank deep in a
house that like this was empty in every part It was 1631--I’ll leave you
but that clue to my age at the time--and, well I was an even prettier
lad than I am to-day. I see you smile, Master Gordon; but that’s my bit
joke. Still there’s some relevance to my story in my looks too. Though
I was but a sergeant of pikes (with sons of good families below me, as
privates, mind you), I was very trim and particular about my apparel.
I carried myself with a good chest, as we say,--my features and my leg
speak for themselves. I had sung songs--trifles of my own, foolishly
esteemed, I’m hearing, in many parts of Argile. I’ll not deny but I like
to think of that, and to fancy young folks humming my ditties by warm
Ares when I’m maybe in the cold with the divot at my mouth. And I had
told a tale or two--a poor art enough, I’ll allow, spoiled by bookcraft
It was a cheery company as you may guess, and at last I was at a display
of our Highland dancing. I see dancing to-day in many places that is not
the thing as I was taught it by the strongest dancer in all Albainn. The
company sat facing me as I stepped it over a couple of sword-blades,
and their backs were to the door. Mackenzie was humming a _port-a-bheul_
with a North Country twang even in his nose, and I was at my last
step when the door opened with no noise and a girl looked in, her eyes
staring hard at me alone, and a finger on her lips for silence. A man of
less discernment would have stopped his dance incontinent and betrayed
the presence of the lady to the others, who never dreamt so interesting
a sight was behind them. But I never let on. I even put an extra
flourish on my conclusion, that came just as the girl backed out at the
door beckoning me to follow her. Two minutes later, while my friends
were bellowing a rough Gaelic chorus, I was out following my lady of
silence up a little stair and into a room below the eaves. There she
narrated to me the plot that we unhappy lads were to be the victims
of. The house was a trap: it was to be surrounded at night, when we had
eaten and drunken over-well, and the sword was our doom arranged for.
The girl told me all this very quietly in the French she learned I was
best master of next to my own Gaelic, and--what a mad thing’s the blood
in a youth--all the time I was indifferent to her alarum, and pondering
upon her charms of lip and eye. She died a twelvemonth later in Glogoe
of Silesia, and---- God give her peace!”
“You may save your supplication,” said Gordon; “her portion’s assigned,
a thing fixed and unalterable, and your prayer is a Popish conceit.”
“God give her peace! I’ll say it, Master Gordon, and I’ll wish it in the
face of every Covenanter ever droned a psalm! She died in Silesia, not
careless, I’m thinking, of the memory of one or two weeks we spent
in Frankfort, whose outer lanes and faubourgs are in my recollection
blossoming with the almond-flower and scented at eve.”
He rose to his feet and paced the floor beside us, strong, but loosened
a little at the tongue by the generous wine of Dalness; his mien a
blending of defiance against the cheatry of circumstance and a display
of old ancient grief.
“Heart of the rose, _gramachree_, bird-song at the lip, star eye and
wisdom, yet woman to the core! I wish I were so young as then I was, and
_ochanie_, what availed my teens, if the one woman that ever understood
me were no more but a dust in Glogoe!”
“Come, come, man,” I cried; “it’s a world full of very choice women.”
“Is it indeed?” asked he, turning on me a pitiful eye; “I’m wrong if you
ever met but one that was quite so fine as you must have them---- Tuts,
tuts, here I’m on the key of old man’s history. I cheat myself at times
of leisure into the notion that once I loved a foreign girl who died a
spotless maiden. You’ll notice, Master Gordon, I have something of the
sentiment you Low-landers make such show of, or I play-act the thing
very well. Believe me, I’ll hope to get a wife out of your parish some
day yet; but I warn you she must have a tocher in her stocking as well
as on her father’s hill.”
The minister surveyed him through half-shut eyes, leaning back on the
rungs of his chair. I think he saw the truth as clearly as I did myself,
for he spoke with more than common softness when he answered.
“I like your tale,” he said, “which had a different conclusion and a
more noble one than what I looked for at the opening.” Then he leaned
out and put a hand on John Splendid’s sleeve. “Human nature,” said
he, “is the most baffling of mysteries. I said I knew you from boot to
bonnet, but there’s a corner here I have still to learn the secret of.”
“Well, well,” cried M’Iver, lifting a glass confusedly, and seating
himself again at the board, “here’s a night-cap--MacCailein Mor and the
Campbell cause!”
“And a thought for the lady of Regenwalde,” I whispered, pressing his
foot with my toe beneath the table, and clinking my glass with his.
We drank, the two of us, in a silence, and threw the glasses on the
hearth.
The windows, that now were shuttered, rattled to gowsty airs, and
the rain drummed on. All about the house, with its numerous corners,
turrets, gussets, and corbie-stepped gables, the fury of the world rose
and wandered, the fury that never rests but is ever somewhere round the
ancient universe, jibing night and morning at man’s most valiant effort.
It might spit and blow till our shell shook and creaked, and the staunch
walls wept, and the garden footways ran with bubbling waters, but we
were still to conquer. Our lanthorn gleamed defiance to that brag of
night eternal, that pattern-piece of the last triumph of the oldest
enemy of man--Blackness the Rider, who is older than the hoary star.
Fresh wood hissed on the fire, but the candles burned low in their
sockets. Sonachan and the baron-bailie slept with their heads on the
table, and the man with the want, still sodden at the eyes, turned his
wet hose upon his feet with a madman’s notion of comfort.
“I hope,” said M’Iver, “there’s no ambuscade here, as in the house
of the cousin of his Grace of Pomerania. At least we can but bide
on, whatever comes, and take the night’s rest that offers, keeping a
man-about watch against intrusion.”
“There’s a watch more pressing still,” said Master Gordon, shaking the
slumber off him and jogging the sleeping men upon the shoulders. “My
soul watcheth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning. We
have been wet with the showers of the mountain, like Job, and embracing
the rock for want of a shelter. We are lone-haunted men in a wild land
encompassed by enemies; let us thank God for our safety thus far, and
ask. His continued shield upon our flight.”
And in the silence of that great house, dripping and rocking in the
tempest of the night, the minister poured out his heart in prayer. It
had humility and courage too; it was imbued with a spirit strong and
calm. For the first time my heart warmed to the man who in years after
was my friend and mentor--Alexander Gordon, Master of the Arts, the man
who wedded me and gave my children Christian baptism, and brought solace
in the train of those little ones lost for a space to me among the
grasses and flowers of Kilmalieu.