WHICH TREATS OF MANY THINGS.
I have said that Laura Everingham was pretty rather than beautiful,
and graceful rather than dignified. I may add, that she was winning
rather than witty; but her friend Miss Clavering was both beautiful
and brilliant; and frequently as I had seen both these attractive
English girls, it was Laura, whose gentleness, voice, and face, made
the most vivid impression on me; and thus, with my mind full of her
image, I returned slowly and thoughtfully towards the old
jointure-house of Glen Ora.
Three weeks passed away.
The great service we, or Callum, rather, had rendered to Sir Horace,
was forgotten, for the adventures of that night had given the baronet
a violent and all-absorbing fit of the gout, and a fever which
confined him to bed; and amid his friends, the luxuries which
surrounded him, and the frivolities of fashionable life, he forgot
that save for the fearless heart and strong arm of Mac Ian he must
have perished by the waters of the Uisc Dhu, without leaving,
perhaps, a trace of his fate behind. And poor Callum--he whose
Spartan virtue had declined the proffered reward--was often almost
starving; for his little crop had failed; his patches of wheat and
potatoes were blighted, though carefully reared on the sunny side of
Ben Ora; and, like others in the glen, he anticipated with sorrow and
anxiety the usual visit of the pious and uncompromising Snaggs when
the term-time arrived.
My poor mother's health was failing fast, and as it failed, her
spirit sank. She lacked many comforts which I was without the means
of procuring; and though old Mhari and her niece Minnie were
unwearying and unremitting in their kindness and ministry, she seemed
to be dying literally by inches, yet without any visible ailment--a
painful and a terrible contemplation for me, who, except the people
in the glen, and the ties of blood old Highland custom and tradition
gave between us, had not another relative in the world; for all my
kindred--ay more than thirty of them--had died, as I have said, in
the service of their country.
She was passing away from among us, and now, for her sake, I
regretted that my foster-brother had not stooped to avail himself of
the reward proffered by Sir Horace; for even that small sum would
have been at her service, as honest Callum Mac Ian loved and revered
her as if she had been his own mother.
With such sad, bitter, and humiliating reflections, the memory of the
winning smile, the thankful glance, and soft pretty manner of Laura
Everingham, struggled hard for mastery; but as weeks rolled on, these
pleasing recollections gave place to a just emotion of anger, at what
I deemed her cold and haughty neglect of my mother, whom she had
neither visited nor invited to the new house of Glen Ora. Vague
suspicions floated in my mind that Snaggs the factor was in some
degree to blame for this apparent discourtesy, and these surmises
afterwards proved to be correct. Moreover, the moustached Captain
Clavering, and his perfumed friend, Mr. Adolphus Frederick Snobleigh,
whom we saw shooting and deer-stalking on the hill sides, usually
passed me with a nod or glance of recognition, because I was coarsely
clad, and to them seemed but a mountain gilly, though every bonnet in
Glen Ora was veiled at my approach in reverence to the name I
inherited. But this was the result of old Celtic sympathies--the
ties of clanship and kindred, the historical, traditionary, and
poetic veneration of the Highland peasant for the head of his house,
humbled and poor though that house may be; sympathies deep, bitter,
fiery and enthusiastic, and beyond the comprehension of a
devil-may-care guardsman like Clavering, or an effeminate _blasé
parvenu_, and man-about-town, like Snobleigh.
Once a liveried lacquey with a well-powdered head brought a beautiful
bouquet of flowers 'with Miss Everingham's love to Mrs. Captain Mac
Innon;' but as this knock-knee'd gentleman in the red plush
inexpressibles was over-attentive to our pretty Minnie, her lover
Callum flung him out of the front door, and tore his livery; and such
was the report made by Mr. Jeames Toodles of his reception at the old
jointure-house, that no more messages came from the family of Sir
Horace.
Now came the crisis in the fortunes of the cottars of Glen Ora. The
postman who travelled once weekly over the mountains, and bore the
letters for the district, in a leathern bag strapped across his back,
brought for each resident, myself included, a notice that Mr. Ephraim
Snaggs would be in the glen on a certain day, to hold a rent-court,
and collect the arrears; with a brief intimation, that if all demands
were not satisfied in full, the houses would be destroyed, and the
people driven off. That night, there went a wail of lamentation
through the glen; the women wept, and the men gazed about them with
the sullen apathy in which a despairing mariner may see his ship
going down into the ocean, for there were neither remedy nor mercy to
be expected. Our people were able to live comfortably in the glen,
as for ages their forefathers had done, marrying and giving in
marriage--increasing and multiplying, till their corn patches and
little green cottages dotted all the mountain slopes; but curbed by
the game-laws, and thence deprived of those substitutes by which
nature replaced the sterility of the soil--ruined by the wanton
destruction of the kelp manufacture, and by having their rents
doubled, tripled, and quadrupled with the deliberate intention that
they should be unable to pay them, and hence afford to the feudal
lord of the land a LEGAL EXCUSE for sweeping them to the sea-shore,
that the glens may be made a wilderness for game, and their hearths a
lair for the deer, the fox, and the wild cat--the peasantry found
themselves helpless! And thus it is, that in virtue of a fragment of
sheepskin, we find men in Scotland, exerting over their fellow-men a
murderous and inhuman tyranny; such as was never wielded by the worst
feudal despots in the middle ages of Germany, or in the present days
of Russia. But to resume my story:
In addition to our little household, we had now to support Callum
Dhu, who had been afflicted by a sickness--I verily believe, the
result of mere want and privation, for he was too proud to
acknowledge, that occasionally days elapsed without his fast being
broken. He was entitled to four hundred merks Scots, and a good dram
for every fox's head; but as he was weak and ailing, the foxes got
into places beyond his reach, and rabbits became scarce. We could
not see Callum starve; for never did brother love brother more
sincerely than my fosterer loved me; and but for this sentiment, and
his ardent regard for Minnie and his native glen, the poor fellow had
long since abandoned his hut, and joined one of our eight Highland
regiments.
Now came 'the day--the great, the eventful day,' when Snaggs the
factor, accompanied by his clerk (the latter custodier of a wooden
box and a green-baize bag), both on trotting Highland garrons,
appeared at the lower entrance of the glen, their advance into which
was witnessed by the cottars with greater excitement, and certainly
far more terror than their forefathers, when beholding the _Sliochd
Dhiarmed an Tuirc_, numbering a thousand swordsmen under Black Colin
of Rhodez, march through the same pass against the Mac Innons of Glen
Ora, and the Mac Intyres of Glen O.
And now, with the reader's permission, I will devote a short
paragraph to Mr. Snaggs.
He was externally a very religious man, and grave in his deportment,
being an elder of a dissenting kirk. Having been bred to the law in
Edinburgh, he spoke with an extremely English accent, as nothing
Scottish is much in vogue about 'the Parliament House;' for
unfortunately, the language which our Lowlanders received from their
brave ancestors who came from the Cimbric Chersonese--a language in
which the sweetest of our poets have sung--the language spoken by
Mary Queen of Scots, in which Knox preached, and all our laws are
written, is voted vulgar by the growing 'snobbishness' of the
Scottish people themselves--excuse the term pray, but I know of none
more suitable--hence Mr. Snaggs spoke with a marvellous accent, and
it would have been quite in vain to quote to such as he the words of
honest Ninian Wingate, when he warned John Knox--'Gif ye throw
curiositie of novationis hes forgot our auld plane Scottis qwhilk
your mither lernit you, in tymes coming I sall wryt to yow my mynd in
Latin, for I am nocht acquynt with your Southeron.' Mr. Snaggs went
to kirk thrice on Sunday; he was a member of various
tract-distributing societies, and always wore a white neckcloth, and
scrupulously accurate suit of black; he was a great believer in
whisky-toddy and the patriotism of the Lord Advocate. Honesty and
charity were ever in his mouth, but never in his heart or hand; he
never swore by aught save his honour, which was a somewhat tattered
article. He never was known to do good by stealth 'and blush to find
it fame;' but he subscribed largely to all _printed_ lists,
especially such as were headed by philanthropic and noble
depopulators. His keen grey eyes were expressive alternately of
cunning and malevolence, while his mouth wore a perpetual smile or
grin. Cringing and mean to the rich, Snaggs was a tyrant and
oppressor of the poor, and led the van of that all-but-organized
system of extermination pursued by certain infamous dukes, marquises,
and lairds towards the poor Highland peasantry; and he was a vehement
advocate for the substitution of bare sheep-walks and useless
game-preserves, instead of glens studded by little cottages, and
teeming with life and rural health, and peopled by a brave and hardy
race, who in the ranks of war gave place to none, and who, although
they have no feudal charters, are by right of inheritance the true
lords of the soil.
Such was the smooth, pious, fawning but terrible Ephraim Snaggs, who
made his appearance in Glen Ora punctually at eleven o'clock on the
appointed day. Now we had no longer any hope of remaining in the old
jointure-house, for I do not believe that anything save a miracle
would have raised fifty pounds among us, and the age of miracles is
past.