Tynree is the Gaelic of a name that in the English is King’s House. What
humour gave so gaudy a title to so humble a place I have been always
beat to know. For if the poorest of the chiefs of the poor isles had
his choice of the gallows at once or Tynree for a long habitation, I’m
thinking he would cry, “Out with your rope.” Standing all its lee lone
on the edge of the wildest moor of all the Scottish kingdom, blustered
on by the winds of Glen-coe and Glen Etive, the house, far apart from
any other (even a hunter’s bothy among the corries), must be eerie,
empty of all but its owner at most seasons of the year. He will have
nothing about him but the flying plover that is so heart-breaking in its
piping at the grey of morn, for him must the night be a dreariness no
rowth of cruisie or candle may mitigate. I can fancy him looking out day
after day upon plains of snow and cruel summits, blanching and snarling
under sodden skies, and him wishing that God so good was less careless,
and had given him a home and trade back among the cosy little glens,
if not in the romping towns. But they tell me--people who rove and have
tried Tynree in all weathers--that often it is cheerful with song and
story; and there is a tale that once upon a time a little king, out
adventuring in the kingly ways of winter stories, found this tavern in
the wilds so warm, so hospitable, so resounding with the songs of good
fellows, that he bided as a duc for a week of the winter weather.
When I came on Tynree, it was sounding with music, just, it might be,
as in the day of the king in the story. Three of the morning, yet the
hostel sent out a most hearty reek and firelight, the odours of stewing
meats and of strong waters, and the sound of piping and trumping and
laughing.
I stood back a piece from the house and debated with myself whether or
not it was one where the tartan of Diarmaid would be sure of a welcome
even if his sporran jingled with gold to the very jaws. All I wanted was
shelter till the day broke and-this may seem odd to any one who has not
known the utter wearisomeness of being a hunted man jinking in the dark
among woods and alleys--the easy conversation of some human beings with
no thought bothering them but what would be for the next meal, or the
price of cattle at a town tryst And song and trump-come, I’ll tell the
G--s own truth upon that! They called me Sobersides in those days: Miver
gave me the name and kept it on me lili the very last, and yet sobriety
of spirit (in one way) was the last quality in those oh! days of no
grace to find in my nature. I liknl to sit in taverns, drinking not
deeply, but enough to keep the mood from flagging, with people of the
young heart, people fond of each other, adrift from all commercial
cunning, singing old staves and letting their fancy go free to a tunc
twanged on a Jew’s-tnimp or squeezed upon a lagulie or rigged upon a
fiddle. So the merriment of I’ynree held me like a charm, and a mad whin
last seized me, and in I went, confident that my insttn of comradery
would not deceive me, and that at last I hail the boon-companion’s
chance.
Its company never even stopped their clamour to look at me; the landlord
put a jug at my elbow, and a whang of bread and cheese, and I was
joining with an affected gusto in a chorus less than ten minutes after
I had been a hunted man on the edge of Moor Ran No ready to toss up a
bawbee to learn whither my road should be.
It was an orra and remarkable gathering, convened surely by the trickery
of a fantastic and vagabond providence,--“not a great many, but well
picked,” as Mac-gregor the Mottled said of his band of thieves. There
were men and women to the number of a score, two or three travelling
merchants (as they called themselves, but I think in my mind they were
the kind of merchants who bargain with the dead corp on the abandoned
battle-field, or follow expeditions of war to glean the spoil from
burning homesteads); there were several gangrels, an Irishman with a
silver eye, a strolling piper with poor skill of his noble instrument,
the fiddler who was a drunken native of the place, a gipsy and his wife
and some randy women who had dropped out of the march of Montrose’s
troops. Over this notable congregation presided the man of the
house--none of your fat and genial-looking gentlemen, but a long lean
personage with a lack-lustre eye. You would swear he would dampen the
joy of a penny wedding, and yet (such a deceit is the countenance) he
was a person of the finest wit and humour, otherwise I daresay Tynree
had no such wonderful party in it that night.
I sat by the fire-end and quaffed my ale, no one saying more to me for
a little than “There you are!” Well enough they knew my side in the
issue--my tartan would tell them that--but wandering bodies have no
politics beyond the conviction that the world owes them as easy a
living as they can cheat it out of, and they never mentioned war. The
landlord’s dram was on, and ‘twas it I had shared in, and when it was
over I pulled out a crown and bought the heartiest goodwill of a score
of rogues with some flagons of ale.
A beetle-browed chamber, long, narrow, stifling with the heat of a great
fire, its flagged floor at intervals would slap with bare or bauchled
feet dancing to a short reel. First one gangrel would sing a verse or
two of a Lowland ballant, not very much put out in its sentiment by the
presence of the random ladies; then another would pluck a tune upon the
Jew’s-trump, a chorus would rise like a sudden gust of wind, a jig
would shake upon the fiddle. I never saw a more happy crew, nor yet one
that--judging from the doctrine that thrift and sobriety have their just
reward--deserved it less. I thought of poor Master Gordon somewhere dead
or alive in or about Dalness, a very pupil of Christ, and yet with
a share of His sorrows, with nowhere to lay his head, but it did not
bitter me to my company.
By-and-by the landlord came cannily up to me and whispered in my ear a
sort of apology for the rabble of his house.
“You ken, sir,” said he in very good English--“you ken yourself what
the country’s like just now, given over to unending brawl, and I am
glad to see good-humoured people about me, even if they are penniless
gangrels.”
“My own business is war,” I acknowledged; “I’ll be frank enough to tell
you I’m just now making my way to Inneraora as well as the weather and
the MacDonalds will let me.”
He was pleased at my candour, I could see; confidence is a quality that
rarely fails of its purpose. He pushed the bottle towards me with the
friendliest of gestures, and took the line of the fellow-conspirator.
“Keep your thumb on that,” said he; “I’m not supposed to precognosce
every lodger in Tynree upon his politics. I’m off Clan Chattan myself,
and not very keen on this quarrel--that’s to say, I’ll take no side
in it, for my trade is feeding folk and not fighting them. Might I be
asking if you were of the band of Campbells a corps of MacDonalds were
chasing down the way last night?”
I admitted I was.
“I have nothing to do with it,” said he; “and I’ll do a landlord’s duty
by any clan coming my way. As for my guests here, they’re so pleased to
see good order broken in the land and hamlets half-harried that
they’ll favour any man whose trade is the sword, especially if he’s
a gentleman,” he added. “I’m one myself, though I keep a sort of poor
hostel here. I’m a young son.”
We were joined by the gipsy, a bold tall man with very black and lambent
eyes, hiccoughing with drink but not by any means drunken, who took out
a wallet and insisted on my joining now in his drink. I dare not refuse
the courtesy.
“Would you like your fortune spaed, sir?” asked my black friend,
twitching his thumb in the direction of his wife, who was leering on me
with a friendliness begot of the bottle. The place was full of deafening
noises and peat-smoke. Fiddle jigged and pipes snored in the deep notes
of debauchery, and the little Jew’s-trump twanged between the teeth of a
dirty-faced man in a saffron shirt and hodden breeks, wanting jacket and
hose--a wizen little old man, going around the world living like a poet
in realms whereto trump and tipple could readily bring him.
“Spae my fortune!” said I, laughing; “such swatches of the same as I
had in the past were of no nature to make me eager to see what was to
follow.”
“Still and on,” said he, “who knows but you may find a wife and a good
fortune in a little lurk of the thumb? Jean! Jean! woman,” he
cried across the chamber to his callet, and over she came to a very
indifferent and dubious client.
I had got my hand read a score of times ere this (for I am of a nature
curious and prying), and each time the reading was different, but it did
not altogether shake my faith in wise women; so, half for the fun of it,
I put some silver pieces in the loof of my hand and held it before the
woman, the transaction unnoticed by the company. She gave the common
harangue to start with. At last, “There’s a girl with a child,” said
she.
“Faith, and she never went to the well with the dish-clout then,” said
the black man, using a well-known Gaelic proverb, meaning a compliment
in his dirty assumption.
“She’s in a place of many houses now,” went on the woman, busy upon the
lines of my hand, “and her mind is taken up with a man in the ranks of
Argile.”
“That’s not reading the hand at all, goodwife,” said I; “those small
facts of life are never written in a line across the loof.”
“Jean is no apprentice at the trade,” said her man across her shoulder.
“She can find a life’s history in the space of a hair.”
“The man found the woman and the child under a root of fir,” said the
woman, “and if the man is not very quick to follow her, he may find
kinship’s courting get the better of a far-off lover’s fancy.”
“_Dhè!_” said I; “you have your story most pat. And what now, would
you say, would be the end of it all--coming to the real business of the
palmist, which, I take it, is not to give past history but to forecast
fate?”
I’ll not deny but I was startled by the woman’s tale, for here was Betty
and here was MacLachlan put before me as plainly as they were in my own
mind day and night since we left Inneraora.
The woman more closely scrutinised my hand, paused a while, and seemed
surprised herself at its story.
“After all,” said she, “the woman is not going to marry the man she
loves.”
I plucked my hand away with a “Pshaw! what does it matter? If I doubled
your fee you would give me the very best fortune in your wit to devise.”
The Irishman with the silver eye here jostled a merchantman, who drew
his gully-knife, so that soon there was a fierce quarrel that it took
all the landlord’s threats and vigour of arm to put an end ta By this
time I was becoming tired of my company; now that the spae-wife had
planted the seed of distress in my mind, those people were tawdry,
unclean, wretched. They were all in rags, foul and smelling; their
music was but noise demented. I wondered at myself there in so vicious
a company. And Betty--home--love--peace--how all the tribe of them
suddenly took up every corner of my mind. Oh! fool, fool, I called
myself, to be thinking your half-hearted wooing of the woman had left
any fondness behind it. From the beginning you were second in the field,
and off the field now--a soldier of a disgraced army, has the cousin not
all the chances in the world? Hell be the true friend in trouble, hell
console her loneliness in a sacked burgh town; a woman’s affection is so
often her reward for simple kindness that he has got her long ago at no
greater cost than keeping her company in her lonely hours. And you are
but the dreamer, standing off trembling and flushing like a boy when you
should be boldly on her cheek, because you dare not think yourself her
equal The father’s was the true word: “There’s one thing a woman will
not abide, that her lover should think lightly either of himself or
her.”
All that black stream of sorry thought went rushing through me as I
sat with an empty jug in my hand in a room that was sounding like a
market-place. With a start I wakened up to find the landlord making a
buffoon’s attempt at a dance in the middle of the floor to the tune of
the Jew-trump, a transparent trick to restore the good-humour of his
roysterers, and the black man who had fetched the spae-wife was standing
at my side surveying me closely out of the corners of his eyes. I stood
to my feet and ganted with great deliberation to pretend I had been
half-sleeping. He yawned too, but with such obvious pretence that I
could not but laugh at him, and he smiled knowingly back.
“Well,” said he in English, “you’ll allow it’s a fair imitation, for I
never heard that a put-on gant was smittal. I see that you are put about
at my wife’s fortune: she’s a miracle at the business, as I said; she
has some secrets of fate I would rather with her than me. But I would
swear a man may sometime get the better even of fate if he has a warning
of its approach.”
“I can scarcely see that by the logic of Porphyrius or Peter Hispanus
with the categories, two scholars I studied at Glascow. But you
are surely a queer man to be a vagabond at the petticoat-tails of a
spae-wife,” said I.
“I’ve had my chance of common life, city and town, and the company of
ladies with broidery and camisole and washen faces,” he answered with no
hesitation, “and give me the highroad and freedom and the very brute of
simplicity. I’m not of these parts. I’m not of the Highlands at all, as
you may guess, though I’ve been in them and through them for many a day.
I see you’re still vexed about my woman’s reading of your palm. It seems
to have fitted in with some of your experience.”
I confessed her knowledge of my private affairs surprised me, and his
black eyes twinkled with humour.
“I’ll explain the puzzle for just as much money as you gave her,” said
he, “and leave you more satisfied at the end than she did. And there’s
no black art at the bottom of my skill either.”
“Very well,” said I; “here’s your drink-money; now tell me the trick of
it, for trick I suppose it is.”
He pocketed the money after a vagabond’s spit on the coin for luck, and
in twenty words exposed his by-love’s device. They had just come from
Inneraora two or three days before, and the tale of the Provost’s
daughter in Strongara had been the talk of the town.
“But how did your wife guess the interest of the lady in a man of
Argile’s army?” I asked.
“Because she spaed the lady’s fortune too,” he answered, “and she had to
find out in the neighbourhood what it was like to be before she did so;
you know that is half the art of the thing.”
“Yet your woman’s guess that I was the man--that’s beyond me!”
“I was struck myself when she out with that,” he confessed. “Oh, she’s a
deep one, Jean! But your manner and tongue betrayed the returned soldier
of fortune; of such officers in the ranks of Argile there are not so
many that it was risking too much to believe all of them knew the story
of the Provost’s daughter, and your conduct, once she got that length,
did the rest.”
“And about kinship’s courting?” I asked, amazed at the simplicity of the
thing.
The man dashed his fee on the board and ordered more liquor.
“Drink up,” said he, “and drown care if you’re the man my good-wife
thought you, for faith there’s a little fellow from over the loch making
himself very snug in the lady’s company in your absence.”
There was no more drinking for me; the fumes of this wretched company
stank in my nostril, and I must be off to be alone with melancholy. Up
I got and walked to the door with not fair-good-e’en nor fair-good-day,
and I walked through the beginnings of a drab disheartening dawn in the
direction that I guessed would lead me soonest to Bredalbane. I walked
with a mind painfully downcast, and it was not till I reached a little
hillock a good distance from the Inns at Tynree, a hillock clothed with
saugh saplings and conspicuously high over the flat countryside, that I
looked about me to see where I was.