We got a cold welcome from the women of our own clan and country. They
had been very warm and flattering as we passed north--the best they had
was not good enough for us; now they eyed us askance as we went among
them in the morning. Glenurchy at its foot was wailing with one loud
unceasing coronach made up of many lamentations, for no poor croft, no
keep, no steading in all the countryside almost, but had lost its man at
Inverlochy. It was terrible to hear those sounds and see those sights
of frantic women setting every thought of life aside to give themselves
wholly to their epitaphs for the men who would come no more.
For ordinary our women keen but when they are up in years and without
the flowers of the cheek that the salt tear renders ugly; women who have
had good practice with grief, who are so far off from the fore-world
of childhood where heaven is about the dubs of the door that they find
something of a dismal pleasure in making wails for a penny or two or a
cogie of soldier’s brose. They would as soon be weeping as singing; have
you not seen them hurrying to the hut to coronach upon a corpse,
with the eager step of girls going to the last dance of the harvest?
Beldames, witches, I hate your dirges, that are but an old custom of
lamentation! But Glenurchy and Lochow to-day depended for their sorrow
upon no hired mourners, upon no aged play-actors at the passion of
grief; cherry-cheeked maidens wept as copiously as their grand-dames,
and so this universal coronach that rose and fell on the wind round by
Stronmealchan and Inish-trynich, and even out upon the little isles that
snuggle in the shadow of Cruachan Ben, had many an unaccustomed note;
many a cry of anguish from the deepest well of sorrow came to the ear.
To walk by a lake and hear griefs chant upon neighbouring isles is
the chief of the Hundred Dolours. Of itself it was enough to make us
melancholy and bitter, but it was worse to see in the faces of old women
and men who passed us surly on the road, the grudge that we had been
spared, we gentlemen in the relics of fine garments, while their own
lads had been taken. It was half envy that we, and not their own,
still lived, and half anger that we had been useless in preventing
the slaughter of their kinsmen. As we walked in their averted or surly
looks, we had no heart to resent them, for was it not human nature? Even
when a very old crooked man with a beard like the foam of the linn, and
eyes worn deep in their black sockets by constant staring upon care, and
through the black mystery of life, stood at his door among his wailing
daughters, and added to his rhyming a scurrilous verse whereof we were
the subjects, we did no more than hurry our pace.
By the irony of nature it was a day bright and sunny; the _londubh_
parted his beak of gold and warbled flutey from the grove, indifferent
to all this sorrow of the human world. Only in far-up gashes of the
hills was there any remnant of the snow we had seen cover the country
like a cloak but a few days before. The crows moved briskly about in the
trees of Cladich, and in roupy voices said it might be February of the
full dykes but surely winter was over and gone. Lucky birds! they were
sure enough of their meals among the soft soil that now followed the
frost in the fields and gardens; but the cotters, when their new grief
was weary, would find it hard to secure a dinner in all the country once
so well provided with herds and hunters, now reft of both.
I was sick of this most doleful expedition; M’Iver was no less, but he
mingled his pity for the wretches about us with a shrewd care for the
first chance of helping some of them. It came to him unexpectedly in a
dark corner of the way through Cladich wood, where a yeld hind lay with
a broken leg at the foot of a creag or rock upon which it must have
stumbled. Up he hurried, and despatched and gralloched it with his
_sgian dubh_ in a twinkling, and then he ran back to a cot where women
and children half craved us as we passed, and took some of them up to
this lucky find and divided the spoil It was a thin beast, a prey no
doubt to the inclement weather, with ivy and acorn, its last meal, still
in its paunch.
It was not, however, till we had got down Glenaora as far as Carnus that
we found either kindness or conversation. In that pleasant huddle of
small cothouses, the Macarthurs, aye a dour and buoyant race, were
making up their homes again as fast as they could, inspired by the old
philosophy that if an inscrutable God should level a poor man’s dwelling
with the dust of the valley, he should even take the stroke with
calmness and start to the building again. So the Macarthurs, some
of them back from their flight before Antrim and Athole, were throng
bearing stone from the river and turf from the brae, and setting up
those homes of the poor, that have this advantage over the homes of the
wealthy, that they are so easily replaced. In this same Carnus, in later
years, I have made a meal that showed curiously the resource of its
people. Hunting one day, I went to a little cothouse there and asked for
something to eat A field of unreaped barley stood ripe and dry before
the door. Out the housewife went and cut some straws of it, while her
daughter shook cream in a bottle, chanting a churn-charm the while. The
straw was burned to dry the grain, the breeze win’d it, the quern ground
it, the fire cooked the bannocks of it Then a cow was milked, a couple
of eggs were found in the loft, and I sat down in a marvellously short
space of time to bread and butter, milk, eggs, and a little drop of
spirits that was the only ready-made provand in the house. And though
now they were divided between the making of coronachs and the building
of their homes, they had still the art to pick a dinner, as it were, off
the lichened stone.
There was one they called Niall Mor a Chamais (Big Neil of Karnes), who
in his day won the applause of courts by slaying the Italian bully who
bragged Scotland for power of thew, and I liked Niall Mor’s word to us
as we proceeded on our way to Inneraora.
“Don’t think,” said he, “that MacCailein’s beat yet, or that the boar’s
tusks are reaped from his jaw. I am of an older clan than Campbell, and
closer on Diarmaid than Argile himself; but we are all under the one
banner now, and I’ll tell you two gentlemen something. They may tear
Castle Inneraora out at the roots, stable their horses in the yard of
Kilmalieu, and tread real Argile in the clay, but well be even with them
yet. I have an arm here” (and he held up a bloody-looking limb, hashed
at Inverlochy); “I’ll build my home when this is mended, and i’ll
challenge MacDonald till my mouth is gagged with the clod.”
“And they tell me your son is dead yonder,” I said, pitying the old man
who had now no wife nor child.
“So they tell me,” said he; “that’s the will of God, and better a fast
death on the field than a decline on the feather-bed. I’ll be weeping
for my boy when I have bigged my house again and paid a call to some of
his enemies.”
Niall Mot’s philosophy was very much that of all the people of the glen,
such of them as were left. They busily built their homes and pondered,
as they wrought, on the score to pay.
“That’s just like me,” M’Iver would say after speeches like that of
Niall Mor. He was ever one who found of a sudden all another person’s
traits in his own bosom when their existence was first manifested to
him. “That’s just like me myself; we are a beaten clan (in a fashion),
but we have our chief and many a thousand swords to the fore yet I
declare to you I am quite cheery thinking we will be coming back
again to those glens and mounts we have found so cruel because of our
loneliness, and giving the MacDonalds and the rest of the duddy crew the
sword in a double dose.”
“Ay, John,” said I, “it’s easy for you to be light-hearted in the
matter. You may readily build your bachelor’s house at Barbreck, and I
may set up again the barn at Elrigmore; but where husband or son is gone
it’s a different story. For love is a passion stronger than hate. Are
you not wondering that those good folk on either hand of us should
not be so stricken that they would be sitting in ashes, weeping like
Rachel?”
“We are a different stuff from the lady you mention,” he said; “I am
aye thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, and
scalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselves
warm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation now
and then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting to
decay. The world’s well divided after all, and the happiness as well as
the dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife nor
child I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me,
and they manage to make up their share of content with reflections upon
the sweetness of revenge. There was never a man so poor and miserable in
this world yet but he had his share of it, even if he had to seek it in
the bottle. Amn’t I rather clever to think of it now? Have you heard of
the idea in your classes?”
“It is a notion very antique,” I confessed, to his annoyance; “but it
is always to your credit to have thought it out for yourself. It is
a notion discredited here and there by people of judgment, but a very
comfortable delusion (if it is one) for such as are well off, and would
salve their consciences against the miseries of the poor and distressed.
And perhaps, after all, you and the wise man of old are right; the
lowest state--even the swineherd’s--may have as many compensations as
that of his master the Earl. It is only sin, as my father would say,
that keeps the soul in a welter------”
“Does it indeed?” said John, lightly; “the merriest men ever I met were
rogues. I’ve had some vices myself in foreign countries, though I aye
had the grace never to mention them, and I ken I ought to be stewing
with remorse for them, but am I?”
“Are you?” I asked.
“If you put it so straight, I’ll say No--save at my best, and my best
is my rarest But come, come, we are not going into Inneraora on a
debate-parade; let us change the subject Do you know I’m like a boy with
a sweet-cake in this entrance to our native place. I would like not to
gulp down the experience all at once like a glutton, but to nibble round
the edges of it We’ll take the highway by the shoulder of Creag Dubh,
and let the loch slip into our view.”
I readily enough fell in with a plan that took us a bit off our way, for
I was in a glow of eagerness and apprehension. My passion to come home
was as great as on the night I rode up from Skipness after my seven
years of war, even greater perhaps, for I was returning to a home now
full of more problems than then. The restitution of my father’s house
was to be set about, six months of hard stint were perhaps to be faced
by my people, and, above all, I had to find out how it stood between a
certain lady and me.
Coming this way from Lochow, the traveller will get his first sight of
the waters of Loch Finne by standing on a stone that lies upon a little
knowe above his lordship’s stables. It is a spot, they say, Argile
himself had a keen relish for, and after a day of chasing the deer among
the hills and woods, sometimes would he come and stand there and look
with satisfaction on his country. For he could see the fat, rich fields
of his policies there, and the tumultuous sea that swarms with fish,
and to his left he could witness Glenaora and all the piled-up numerous
mountains that are full of story if not of crop. To this little knowe
M’Iver and I made our way. I would have rushed on it with a boy’s
impetuousness, but he stopped me with a hand on the sleeve.
“Canny, canny,” said he, “let us get the very best of it There’s a cloud
on the sun that’ll make Finne as cold, flat, and dead as lead; wait till
it passes.”
We waited but a second or two, and then the sun shot out above us, and
we stepped on the hillock and we looked, with our bonnets in our hands.
Loch Finne stretched out before us, a spread of twinkling silver waves
that searched into the curves of a myriad bays; it was dotted with
skiffs. And the yellow light of the early year gilded the remotest hills
of Ardno and Ben Ime, and the Old Man Mountain lifted his ancient rimy
chin, still merrily defiant, to the sky. The parks had a greener hue
than any we had seen to the north; the town revealed but its higher
chimneys and the gable of the kirk, still its smoke told of occupation;
the castle frowned as of old, and over all rose Dunchuach.
“O Dunchuach! Dunchuach!” cried M’Iver, in an ecstasy, spreading out
his arms, and I thought of the old war-worn Greeks who came with weary
marches to their native seas.
“Dunchuach! Dunchuach!” he said; “far have I wandered, and many a town
I’ve seen, and many a prospect that was fine, and I have made songs
to maids and mountains, and foreign castles too, but never a verse to
Dunchuach. I do not know the words, but at my heart is lilting the very
tune, and the spirit of it is here at my breast.”
Then the apple rose in his throat, and he turned him round about that I
might not guess the tear was at his eye.
“Tuts,” said I, broken, “‘tis at my own; I feel like a girl.”
“Just a tickling at the pap o’ the hass,” he said in English; and then
we both laughed.
It was the afternoon when we got into the town. The street was in the
great confusion of a fair-day, crowded with burgesses and landward
tenants, men and women from all parts of the countryside still on
their way back from flight, or gathered for news of Inverlochy from
the survivors, of whom we were the last to arrive. Tradesmen from the
Lowlands were busy fitting shops and houses with doors and windows, or
filling up the gaps made by fire in the long lands, for MacCailein’s
first thought on his return from Edinburgh had been the comfort of the
common people. Seamen clamoured at the quay, loud-spoken mariners from
the ports of Clyde and Leven and their busses tugged at anchor in the
upper bay or sat shoulder to shoulder in a friendly congregation under
the breast-wall, laden to the beams with merchandise and provender
for this hungry country. If Inneraora had been keening for the lost of
Inverlochy, it had got over it; at least we found no public lamentation
such as made our traverse on Lochow-side so dreary. Rather was there
something eager and rapt about the comportment of the people. They
talked little of what was over and bye with, except to curse our Lowland
troops, whose unacquaintance with native war had lost us Inverlochy.
The women went about their business, red-eyed, wan, silent, for the most
part; the men mortgaged the future, and drowned care in debauchery in
the alehouses. A town all out of its ordinary, tapsilteerie. Walking in
it, I was beat to imagine clearly what it had been like in its placid
day of peace. I could never think of it as ever again to be free from
this most tawdry aspect of war, a community in good order, with the day
moving from dawn to dusk with douce steps, and no sharp agony at the
public breast.
But we had no excuse for lingering long over our entrance upon its blue
flagstone pavements; our first duty was to report ourselves in person to
our commander, whose return to Inneraora Castle we had been apprised of
at Cladich.