INVARENDEN—TARBOT—COCKNEY TOURISTS—LOCH LOMOND—INVERSNADE—ROB
ROY’S CAVE—DISCOMFITURE—THE BIRTHPLACE OF HELEN M’GREGOR.
We passed the head of the valley near Tyndrum, where M’Dougal of Lorn
defeated the Bruce, and were half way up the wild pass that makes its
southern outlet, when our Highland driver, with a shout of delight,
pointed out to us a red deer, standing on the very summit of the highest
mountain above us. It was an incredible distance to see any living
thing, but he stood clear against the sky, in a relief as strong as if
he had been suspended in the air, and with his head up, and his chest
toward us, seemed the true monarch of the wild.
At Invarenden, Donald M’Phee begged for the discharge of himself and his
horse and cart from our service. He had come with us eighty miles, and
was afraid to venture farther on his travels, having never before been
twenty miles from the Highland village where he lived. It was amusing to
see the curiosity with which he looked about him, and the caution with
which he suffered the hostler at the inn to take the black mare out of
his sight. The responsibility of the horse and cart weighed heavily on
his mind, and he expressed his hope to “get her back safe,” with an
apprehensive resolution that would have become a knight-errant guiding
himself for his most perilous encounter. Poor Donald! how little he knew
how wide is the world, and how very like one part of it is to another!
Our host of Invarenden supplied us with another cart to take us down to
Tarbot, and having dined with a waterfall-looking inn at each of our two
opposite windows, (the inn stands in a valley between two mountains,) we
were committed to the care of his eldest boy, and jolted off for the
head of Loch Lomond.
I have never happened to see a traveller who had seen Loch Lomond in
perfectly good weather. My companion had been there every summer for
several years, and believed it always rained under Ben Lomond. As we
came in sight of the lake, however, the water looked like one sheet of
gold leaf, trembling, as if by the motion of fish below, but unruffled
by wind; and if paradise were made so fair, and had such waters in its
midst, I could better conceive than before, the unhappiness of Adam when
driven forth. The sun was just setting, and the road descended
immediately to the shore, and kept close under precipitous rocks, and
slopes of alternate cultivation and heather, to the place of our
destination. And a lovely place it is! Send me to Tarbot when I would
retreat from the world. It is an inn buried in a grove at the foot of
the hills, and set in a bend of the lake shore, like a diamond upon an
“orbed brow;” and the light in its kitchen, as we approached in the
twilight, was as interesting as a ray of the “first water” from the
same. We had now reached the route of the cockney tourists, and while we
perceived it agreeably in the excellence of the hotel, we perceived it
disagreeably in the price of the wines, and the presence of what my
friend called “unmitigated vulgarisms” in the coffee room. That is the
worst of England. The people are vulgar, but not vulgar enough. One
dances with the lazzaroni at Naples, when he would scarce think of
handing the newspaper to the “person” on a tour at Tarbot. Condescension
is the only agreeable virtue, I have made up my mind.
Well—it was moonlight. The wind was south and affectionate, and the
road in front of the hotel “fleck’d with silver,” and my friend’s wife,
and the corresponding object of interest to myself, being on the other
side of Ben Lomond and the Tweed, we had nothing for it after supper but
to walk up and down with one another, and talk of the past. In the
course of our ramble, we walked through an open gate, and ascending a
gravel walk, found a beautiful cottage, built between two mountain
streams, and ornamented with every device of taste and contrivance. The
mild pure torrents were led over falls, and brought to the thresholds of
bowers; and seats, and bridges, and winding paths, were distributed up
the steep channels, in a way that might make it a haunt for Titania. It
is the property, we found afterward, of a Scotch gentleman, and a great
summer retreat of the celebrated Jeffrey, his friend. It was one more
place to which my heart clung in parting.
Loch Lomond sat still for its picture in the morning, and after an early
breakfast, we took a row-boat, with a couple of Highlanders, for
Inversnade, and pulled across the lake with a kind of drowsy
delightfulness in the scene and air which I have never before found out
of Italy. We overshot our destination a little to look into Rob Roy’s
Cave, a dark den in the face of the rock, which has the look of his
vocation; and then pulling back along the shore, we were landed, in the
spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied by the boatmen of this
Highland ferry. From this point across to Loch Katrine, is some five
miles, and the scene of Scott’s novel of Rob Roy. It has been “done” so
often by tourists, that I leave all particular description of the
localities and scenery to the well-hammered remembrance of readers of
magazines, and confine myself to my own private adventures.
The distance between the lakes is usually performed by ladies on
donkeys, and by gentlemen on foot, but being myself rather tender-toed
with the gout, my companion started off alone, and I lay down on the
grass at Inversnade to wait the return of the long-eared troop, who were
gone across with an earlier party. The waterfall and the cottage just
above the edge of the lake, a sharp hill behind, closely wooded with
birch and fir, and, on a greensward platform in the rear of the house,
two Highland lasses and a laddie, treading down a stack of new hay, were
not bad circumstances in which to be left alone with the witcheries of
the great enchanter.
I must narrate here an adventure in which my own part was rather a
discomfiture, but which will show somewhat the manners of the people. My
companion had been gone half an hour, and I was lying at the foot of a
tree, listening to the waterfall and looking off on the lake, and
watching, by fits, the lad and lasses I have spoken of, who were
building a haystack between them, and chattering away most unceasingly
in Gaelic. The eldest of the girls was a tall, ill-favored damsel, merry
as an Oread, but as ugly as Donald Bean; and, after a while, I began to
suspect, by the looks of the boy below, that I had furnished her with a
new theme. She addressed some remark to me presently, and a skirmish of
banter ensued, which ended in a challenge to me to climb upon the stack.
It was about ten feet high, and shelving outward from the bottom, and my
Armida had drawn up the ladder. The stack was built, however, under a
high tree, and I was soon up the trunk, and, swinging off from a long
branch, dropped into the middle of the stack. In the same instant I was
raised in a grasp to which I could offer no resistance, and, with a
fling to which I should have believed the strength of few men equal,
thrown clear of the stack to the ground. I alighted on my back, with a
fall of, perhaps, twelve feet, and felt seriously hurt. The next moment,
however, my gentle friend had me in her arms (I am six feet high in my
stockings) and I was carried into the cottage, and laid on a flock bed,
before I could well decide whether my back was broken or no. Whiskey was
applied externally and internally, and the old crone, who was the only
inhabitant of the hovel, commenced a lecture in Gaelic, as I stood once
more sound upon my legs, which seemed to take effect upon the penitent,
though her victim was no wiser for it. I took the opportunity to look at
the frame which had proved itself of such vigorous power; but, except
arms of extraordinary length, she was like any other equally ugly,
middle-sized woman. In the remaining half hour, before the donkeys
arrived, we became the best of friends, and she set me off for Loch
Katrine, with a caution to the ass-driver to take care of me, which that
sandy-haired Highlander took as an excellent joke. And no wonder!
The long mountain glen between these two lakes was the home of Rob Roy,
and the Highlanders point out various localities, all commemorated in
Scott’s incomparable story. The house where Helen M’Gregor was born lies
a stone’s throw off the road to the left, and Rob Roy’s gun is shown by
an old woman who lives near by. He must have been rich in arms by the
same token; for, beside the well-authenticated one at Abbotsford, I have
seen some dozen guns, and twice as many daggers and shot-pouches, which
lay claim to the same honor. I paid my shilling to the old woman not the
less. She owed it to the pleasure I had received from Sir Walter’s
novel.
The view of Loch Lomond back from the highest point of the pass is
incomparably fine; at least, when I saw it; for sunshine and
temperature, and the effect of the light vapors on the hills, were at
their loveliest and most favorable. It looks more like the haunt of a
robber and his caterans, probably, in its more common garb of Scotch
mist; but, to my eye, it was a scene of the most Arcadian peace and
serenity. I dawdled along the five miles upon my donkey, with something
of an ache in my back, but a very healthful and sunny freedom from pain
and impatience at my heart. And so did _not_ Baillie Nicol Jarvey make
the same memorable journey.