THE ALARM.
He soon reached Inversnaid, which lay about three miles distant.
At first he walked but slowly, comparatively speaking, as he believed
the girl to be quite dead; but the motion of her limbs, as he
proceeded, having caused the blood to circulate, he perceived with
joy that she still lived, and then he increased his pace to a run,
which soon brought him to the cottage of her father, Callam
MacAleister (_i.e._, the son of the arrowmaker), to whose care he
consigned her; and the bed of the little sufferer was rapidly
surrounded by all the commiserating gossips and wise-women of the
clachan.
No doctors were required by the hardy men of these secluded
districts. Their wives and daughters knew well how to salve a sore;
to bind up a slash from an axe or sword; to place lint on a
bullet-hole, or on a stab from a dirk; while valerian, all-heal,
liver-wort, and wild carrot, bruised in a quaichful of whisky, formed
the entire _materia medica_ of the matron of a family. So men lived
till patriarchal years, strong, active, and fearless as
mountain-bulls; for sickness was unknown among them.
Of these female family physicians, Rob's wife, the Lady of
Inversnaid, was the queen in her time and locality.
Inversnaid is a small hamlet on the estate of the same name which
formed the patrimony of Rob Roy. It lies two miles eastward from
Loch Lomond, on the bank of a small stream, which falls into the
great sheet of water, from a lesser, named Loch Arklet, a place of
gloomy aspect.
Northward, on the side of the latter, is a deep and wild cavern,
which sheltered Robert Bruce after the battle of Dalree, in
Strathfillan; and on more than one occasion, in time of peril, it
became a place of concealment for our hero.
As MacGregor approached his own house--a large and square two-storied
mansion, the walls of which were rough-cast with white lime, and
which, though thatched with heather, had an air of comfort and
consequence in that locality,--a wild cry, that pierced the still air
of the evening, made him pause and turn round with his right hand on
the hilt of his dirk.
Alarmed by the protracted absence of the boy, Fairhaired Colin, his
widowed mother had sought the glen where the foray had been. The
last red gleam of the sunset had faded upward from the summit of Ben
Lomond, and the dark woods and deep glens about its base were buried
in all the obscurity of night, till the moon arose, and then the
mountain-stream, and the pools amid the moss and heather, glittered
in its silver sheen.
The cattle had disappeared as well as their young watchers, and the
heart of the widow became filled with vague alarm.
Now a mournful cry came at times upon the wind of the valley, and
made her blood curdle. Was it the voice of a spirit of the air, or
of a water-cow, that had come down the stream from the loch? Again
and again it fell upon her ear, till at last she recognized it to be
the howling of her son's companion and favourite, the little otter
terrier; and she rushed forward to discover the dog, which was
concealed by some tufts of broom.
The sweet perfume of the bog-myrtle was filling the atmosphere as the
dew fell on its leaves; and now, deep down in the glen, where the
soil had never been stirred, where the heather grew thick and soft,
and where the yellow broom shed "its tassels on the lea," the poor
woman found her son, her only child, lying dead, and covered with
blood.
His right hand still grasped his skene dhu, and near him lay the
chanter, to the notes of which Oina had sung, and a black, ravenous
glede soared away from the spot as she approached.
At first, his white and ghastly face, his fixed and glazed eyes,
struck terror on the mother's soul, and she shrunk back--shrunk from
the babe she had borne, the child she had nursed; then she cast
herself in wild despair beside the body--in such despair as had never
filled her heart since the Grahames of Montrose had hanged her
husband, Ian Bane, on the old yew-tree of Kincardine, for the crime
of being a--MacGregor.
Then endued by frenzy with superhuman strength, she snatched up the
dead boy, and bore him in her arms, sending shriek after shriek
before her, as she rushed through the glen and across the moorland,
towards the clachan of Inversnaid.
It was her cry that Rob Roy heard, as he paused at his own threshold,
and turning away, he hastened to meet her, just as she sank at the
door of her cottage.
The whole population of the clachan was speedily alarmed, and the
wailing of the women mingled with the deep-muttered vengeance of the
men, as they began to arm, and looked to Rob Roy for orders and
instructions.