It may seem, in my recounting of these cold wanderings, of days and
nights with nothing but snow and rain, and always the hounds of fear on
every hand, that I had forgotten to exercise my mind upon the blunder
and the shame of Argile’s defeat at Inverlochy. So far is this from the
fact that M’Iver and I on many available occasions disputed--as old
men at the trade of arms will do--the reasons of a reverse so much
unexpected, so little to be condoned, considering the advantage we
had in numbers compared with the fragments of clans Alasdair MacDonald
brought down from the gorges of Lochaber to the waters of Loch Linnhe
and Locheil. It was useless to bring either the baron-bailie or Sonachan
into our deliberations; neither of them had any idea of how the thing
had happened, though they were very well informed indeed about certain
trivial departures from strict forms of Highland procedure in the
hurried marshalling of the troops.
“Cheap trash of pennyland men from Lochow-side were put on the right
of gentlemen cadets of the castle and Loch Finne-side lairds,” was the
baron-bailie’s bitter protestation.
Sonachan, who was naturally possessed of a warm side to the people, even
common quality, of his own part of the country, would sniff at this with
some scorn.
“Pennyland here, pennyland there, they were closer in blood on Black
Duncan than any of your shore-side par-tans, who may be gentrice by
sheepskin right but never by the glaive.”
So the two would be off again into the tanglements of Highland pedigree.
The mind of the man with the want was, of course, a vacant tablet,
washed clean of every recollection by the copious tears he had wept in
his silliness since ever the shock of the battle came on him; Stewart
was so much of an unscrupulous liar that no word of his could be
trusted; and the minister alone could give us any idea of what had been
the sentiment in the army when the men of Montrose (who were really the
men of Sir Alas-dair, his major-general) came on them. But, for reasons
every true Gael need not even have a hint of, we were averse from
querying this dour, sour, Lowland cleric on points affecting a Highland
retreat.
So it was, I say, that the deliberations of M’Iver and myself were
without any outside light in somewhat dark quarters: we had to guide us
only yon momentary glimpse of the stricken field with its flying men,
seen in a stupid blur of the senses,--as one lying by a dark hill tarn
at night, waiting for mallard or teal, sees the birds wheeling above the
water ere he has appreciated the whirr of their presence, lets bang his
piece at the midst of them, and is in a dense stillness again before he
comprehends that what he has waited for in the cold night has happened.
“The plan of old Gustavus did it, I’ll wager my share of the
silver-mine,” would John insist; “and who in heaven’s name would think
Alasdair _mosach_ knew the trick of it? I saw his horsemen fire one
pistol-shot and fall on at full speed. That’s old Gustavus for you,
isn’t it? And yet,” he would continue, reflecting, “Auchin-breac knew
the Swedish tactics too. He had his musketeers and pikemen separate,
as the later laws demand; he had even a hint from myself of the due
proportion of two pikes to three muskets.”
“But never a platoon fired a volley,” I recalled. “It was steel and
targe from the onset.” And then I would add, “What’s to be said for
MacCailein?”
On this John Splendid would ruffle up wrothily with blame for my harping
on that incident, as if it were a crime to hint at any weakness in his
chief.
“You are very much afraid of a waff of wind blowing on your cousin’s
name,” I would cry.
“My chief, Elrigmore, my chief. I make no claim to consideration for
a cousin, but I’ll stand up for Argile’s name so long as the gyrony of
eight and the galley for Lorn are in his coat of arms.”
Inverlochy, Inverlochy, Inverlochy--the black name of it rang in my head
like a tolling bell as I sought to doze for a little in Dalness house.
The whole events of the scandalous week piled up on me: I no sooner
wandered one thought away in the mists of the nether mind than a new
one, definite and harassing, grew in its place, so that I was turning
from side to side in a torture-rack of reflection when I should be lost
in the slumber my travel and weariness so well had earned me. Something
of an eeriness at our position in that genteel but lonely house lay
heavy on me too: it had no memories of friendship in any room for me; it
was haunted, if haunted at all, with the ghosts of people whose names we
only breathed with bitterness in the shire of Argile. And constantly the
wind would be howling in it, piping dismally in the vent of the room the
minister and I were in together; constant the rain would be hissing on
the embers of the fire; at a long distance off a waterfall, in veering
gusts of greater vehemence, crashed among its rocks and thundered in its
linn.
M’Iver, who was the first to take watch for the night, paced back and
forth along the lobbies or stood to warm himself at the fire he fed at
intervals with peat or pine-root Though he had a soldier’s reverence for
the slumbers of his comrades, and made the least of noises as he moved
around in his deer-skins, the slightest movement so advertised his zeal,
and so clearly recalled the precariousness of our position, that I
could not sleep. In an hour or more after I lay down M’Iver alarmed
the advance-guard of my coming sleep by his unconscious whistle of a
pibroch, and I sat up to find that the cleric was sharing my waukrife
rest He had cast his peruke. In the light of a cruisie that hung at the
mantel-breas he was a comical-looking fellow with a high bald head, and
his eyes, that were very dark and profound, surrounded by the red rings
of weariness, all the redder for the pallor of his face. He stretched
his legs and rubbed his knees slowly, and smiled on me a little
mournfully.
“I’m a poor campaigner,” said he; “I ought to be making the best of the
chance we have; but instead I must be thinking of my master and patron,
and about my flock in Inneraora town.”
I seized the opportunity as a gled would jump at a dove.
“You’re no worse than myself,” I said, rising to poke up the fire; “I’m
thinking of Argile too, and I wish I could get his defalcation--if that
it may be called--out of my mind. Was it a--was it--what you might call
a desertion without dignity, or a step with half an excuse in policy? I
know MacCailein had an injured arm.”
Gordon rose and joined me at the fireside. He seemed in a swither as to
whether I was a fit confidant or not in such a matter, but at last would
appear to decide in my favour.
“You have heard me speak well of Argile,” he said, quietly. “I never
said a word in his praise that was not deserved; indeed I have been
limited in my valuation of his virtues and ornaments, lest they should
think it the paid chaplain who spoke and not the honest acquaintance.
I know pious men, Highland and Lowland, but my lord of Argile has more
than any of them the qualities of perfection. At home yonder, he rises
every morning at five and is in private till eight. He prays in his
household night and morning, and never went abroad, though but for one
night, but he took his write-book, standish, and English New Bible, and
Newman’s Concordance with him. Last summer, playing one day with the
bullats with some gentlemen, one of them, when the Marquis stopped to
lift his bullat, fell pale, and said to them about him, ‘Bless me, it
is that I see my lord with his head off and all his shoulder full of
blood.’ A wicked man would have counted that the most gloomy portent
and a fit occasion for dread, for the person who spoke was the Laird of
Drimmindorren’s seventh son, with a reputation for the second sight.
But Argile laughed at the thing, no way alarmed, and then with a grave
demeanour he said, said he, ‘The wine’s in your head, sir; and even if
it was an omen, what then? The axe in troublous times is no disgrace,
and a chief of Clan Diarmaid would be a poor chief indeed if he failed
to surrender his head with some show of dignity.”’
“But to leave his people twice in one war with no apparent valid excuse
must look odd to his unfriends,” I said, and I toasted my hose at the
fire.
“I wish I could make up my mind whether an excuse is valid or not,” said
the cleric; “and I’m willing to find more excuses for MacCailein than
I’ll warrant he can find for himself this morning, wherever he may
happen to be. It is the humour of God Almighty sometimes to put two men
in the one skin. So far as I may humbly judge, Argile is the poor
victim of such an economy. You have seen the sort of man I mean: to-day
generous to his last plack, to-morrow the widow’s oppressor; Sunday a
soul humble at the throne of grace, and writhing with remorse for some
child’s sin, Monday riding vain-gloriously in the glaur on the road
to hell, bragging of filthy amours, and inwardly gloating upon a crime
anticipated. Oh, but were the human soul made on less devious plan, how
my trade of Gospel messenger were easy! And valour, too, is it not in
most men a fever of the moment; at another hour the call for courage
might find them quailing and flying like the coney of the rocks.”
“Then Argile, you think, was on those occasions the sport of his weaker
self?” I pushed. I found so many obstacles in the way of satisfaction to
my natural curiosity that I counted no persistence too rude now.
“He was the result of his history,” said the minister, quickly, his face
flushing with a sudden inspiration. “From the start of time those black
moments for the first Marquis of Argile have been preparing. I can speak
myself of his more recent environment He has about him ever flatterers
of the type of our friend the sentinel out there, well-meaning but a
woeful influence, keeping from him every rumour that might vex his ear,
colouring every event in such a manner as will please him. They kept the
man so long in a delusion that fate itself was under his heel, that when
the stress of things came--”
“Not another word!” cried M’Iver from the doorway.
We turned round and found him standing there wrapped up in his plaid,
his bonnet over a frowning brow, menace in his eye.
“Not another word, if it must be in that key. Has Archibald Marquis of
Argile and Lord of Lochow no friends in this convocation? I would have
thought his own paid curate and a neighbour so close as Elrigmore would
never waste the hours due to sleep upon treason to the man who deserved
better of them.”
“You should have eavesdropped earlier and you would have learned that
there was no treason in the matter. I’m as leal friend to my lord of
Argile as you or any of your clan. What do I care for your bubbly-jock
Highland vanity?” said Gordon.
“We were saying nothing of MacCailein that we would not say to you,” I
explained to M’Iver, annoyed in some degree by his interference.
“Ay, ay,” said he, with a pitying shrug of the shoulder, and throwing
off his last objection to my curiosity; “you’re on the old point again.
Man, but you’re ill to satisfy! And yet we must have the story sooner
or later, I suppose. I would rather have it anywhere than in this wauf
and...
[Page 261 missing.]
...malcontents as we thought them, and found Montrose on the braes above
us as the dawn broke. We had but a shot or two apiece to the musket,
they tell me. Dun-barton’s drums rolled, the pipes clamoured, the camp
rose from its sleep in a confusion, and a white moon was fainting behind
us. Argile, who had slept in a galley all night, came ashore in a wherry
with his left arm in a sling. His face was like the clay, but he had a
firm lip, and he was buckling a hauberk with a steady hand as the men
fell under arms. Left alone then, I have a belief that he would have
come through the affair gallantly; but the Highland double-dealings were
too much for him. He turned to Auchinbreac and said ‘Shall I take the
command, or----?’ leaving an alternative for his relative to
guess at Auchinbreac, a stout soldier but a vicious, snapped him very
short ‘Leave it to me, leave it to me,’ he answered, and busied himself
again in disposing his troops, upon whom I was well aware he had no
great reliance. Then Sir James Rollock-Niddry, and a few others pushed
the Marquis to take his place in his galley again, but would he? Not
till Auchinbreac came up a second time, and seeing the contention of his
mind, took your Highland way of flattering a chief, and made a poltroon
act appear one of judgment and necessity. ‘As a man and soldier only,
you might be better here at the onset,’ said Auchinbreac, who had a wily
old tongue; ‘but you are disabled against using sword or pistol; you are
the mainstay of a great national movement, depending for its success on
your life, freedom, and continued exertion.’ Argile took to the galley
again, and Auchinbreac looked after him with a shamed and dubious eye.
Well, well, Sir Duncan has paid for his temporising; he’s in his place
appointed. I passed the knowe where he lay writhing to a terrible end,
with a pike at his vitals, and he was moaning for the chief he had
helped to a shabby flight.”
“A shabby flight!” said M’Iver, with a voice that was new to me, so
harsh was it and so high-set.
“You can pick the word for yourself,” said the minister; “if by heaven’s
grace I was out of this, in Inneraora I should have my own way of
putting it to Argile, whom I love and blame.”
“Oh you Lowland dog!” cried John Splendid, more high-keyed than ever,
“_you_ to blame Argile!” And he stepped up to the cleric, who was
standing by the chimney-jambs, glowered hellishly in his face, then with
a fury caught his throat in his fingers, and pinned him up against the
wall.