THE UISC DHU.
Hawks, gleds, and eagles, with a hundred birds of other kinds, whose
nests had been destroyed, were screaming, as if in anger or surprise,
and flapping their wings about us, in the mid and murky air, as we
clambered up, and thrice the wild cry of the despairing wretch
tingled in my ears, before we reached the summit, after a half-hour
of arduous exertion.
There, on the giddy verge, a strange sight awaited us.
Not far from the spot where Callum had rescued Sir Horace Everingham,
and at a place where the steep rocky brow of the cliffs overhung the
dark chasm through which the foaming waters of the black river
bellowed, roared, and forced a passage towards the sea, we saw the
miserable factor Snaggs dangling in mid-air like a crow, and clinging
to the branches of a tough but withered mountain-ash, and to its
stem, which--terrible to conceive!--projected over this dark
Cimmerian gulf. Hemmed in on every side by the encroaching fire,
which ran at his heels, he had been forced to retreat upward to the
edge of the rock, and though all unused to feats of strength or
agility, excess of terror had supplied him with both; for when the
flames assailed the thick coating of turf, soft heather, and
crackling whins which covered the summit of the Craig, he was
compelled to take refuge in the branches of the mountain-ash, and to
these he clung, swinging above the dark vacuity below, with a
tenacity of clutch and a horror impossible to portray.
But now the same fire which had consumed the tufted whins, the turf
and heath, assailed the dry roots of the ash which twined among them,
and soon the whole fabric of the tree was in a blaze; and as its
fibres crackled and relaxed their tough grasp of the rocks and
smouldering turf, the stem began to sink and yield with its own
weight, and the weight of the fainting sinner who clung to it.
Such was the terrible tableau that awaited us on reaching a ledge of
rock close by it.
As seen by the fitful glimpses of the moon through gauzy clouds and
rolling smoke, the pale, white, ghastly visage of Snaggs was
appalling. He still shrieked for succour and for mercy, and his
entreaties were but a succession of shrill screams like those of a
girl. His eyes glared; foam hung upon his lips, and his tongue was
parched and swollen. I would have hastened to proffer him
assistance, but the strong hands of Callum held me back by main force.
'Mercy to the merciless?' said he; 'nay--he shall have such mercy as
he gave the people of our glens--such mercy as he would have given my
poor Minnie at the Clach-na-greiné. He is a fiend--so let him die a
fiend's death! Ha--ha! Mr. Snaggs--the tree is bending now; once it
rose at the angle of forty-five, now it is quite horizontal. I wish
every factor hung on its branches like fruit for the devil. Think of
the old widow of the Ca-Dearg, and her silver hair all clotted in her
blood; think of the cold, grey morning that dawned on the wet
mountain-side, when the dying wife of the Red Gillespie lay with her
new-born babe, and expired without a shelter from the blast! Her
babe is now where you can never be--for it is among the flowers that
are gathered in heaven! Think of the cruel advice you have given
this jolter-headed stranger--this Horace Everingham--whose presence
has been a curse to us. Think of my Minnie and the evil you intended
for her. Think of all your hypocrisy, your legal quirks and
quibbles, and of all the villanies of your past life, for the root of
the tree burns bravely, and will not last a minute more. Ha! ha! ha!'
The love of life, the lust of gold, and the dread of death and hell
grew strong within the wretched soul of Snaggs, and his aspect became
frightful. Matted by perspiration, his hair clung about his temples,
and his eyes were starting from their sockets. With all the tenacity
that love of existence, conflicting with an awful fate, can impart to
the sinews of a coward, he clung to that withered ash, and swung
wildly over the hideous abyss, where the black water foamed two
hundred feet below.
Now his toes touched the brow of the rock, and anon his feet would
beat the empty air in vain! The flames played about the roots; the
smoke almost choked him, and slowly, gradually, fearfully the stem
continued to sink and to yield, as the knotty fibres which so long
had grasped the rocks were relinquishing their hold at last.
'Mercy--mercy--mercy!' he shrieked.
'Such mercy as you gave the people in Glen Ora and Glentuirc--such
mercy as you have ever given the poor and the trusting, I give you
now--a tiger's mercy!' replied Callum, still holding me back, though
it was physically impossible for me to have afforded the least
assistance to Snaggs, circumstanced as he was then, and cut off from
us by the flaming tree.
'God--God!' gasped the miserable wretch.
'Call not on Him, hypocrite, for even He may fail one so steeped in
wickedness as you. Hear me--I am Callum Dhu Mac Ian, on whom you
have never ceased to heap up insult, contumely, and contempt. I am
well and young, and strong, having, with God's blessing, many years
of life before me, while you are now in the jaws of death. You will
go down into the depth of that dark linn like a stone, Mr. Snaggs; a
splash, a bubble, and all will be over! One sinner more will have
gone to his awful account--'
'Mercy!' he croaked.
The tree was still burning and bending!
'A time will come, a week, a month, a season perhaps, and the deep
waters of Loch Ora will give up the ghastly dead. A corpse, swollen,
hideous and frightful beyond all humanity, will be cast upon the
pebbled beach, and it may lie there long undiscovered, amid gnats
that swarm in the sunshine of noon, and birds that scream in the
night--ay, very long, for our glens are desolate now, and for months
a human foot may never press the heather there. That corpse will be
_yours_, Mr. Snaggs! When found, it will excite awe and wonder, for
the foolish mother that bore you would not know her sinful son; but
anon horror and disgust will force the finders to cover it hastily up
with earth and stones; and there you will rot, Mr. Snaggs, while your
ill-gotten gear will be spent and enjoyed by others.'
'Oh, have mercy upon me!' howled Snaggs, who now ceased to make the
smallest exertion, as every movement served more and more to dislodge
the consuming root. 'Mercy--I tell you--mercy; my dear, good man,
have mercy!'
'Dioul! how long that tree holds on!' cried Callum, stamping his
foot; 'but now it bends! now it breaks! Hoigh--one moment more and
all will be over, Mr. Snaggs!'
The white lips of the victim quivered; he was uttering a voiceless
prayer--or perhaps it was the more contortion and convulsing of his
features. The fitful light of the moon, and occasionally the gleams
of the blazing heather and distant thickets, played on the rocks and
wild plants of the chasm, imparting a satanic effect to the episode.
Suddenly the tree snapped with a crash that made my heart leap, and
with a cry, amid a shower of sparks that flew upward, Snaggs vanished
with the half-burned stem into the black gulf below, where the fierce
and foaming mountain-torrent swept them away like autumn leaves,
towards the deeper waters of the Loch, and the more distant waves of
the Atlantic.
I never heard that his corpse was found.
'It is God's judgment,' said Callum, who had gazed frigidly at this
terrible sight, the realities of which I could not reconcile for a
time, or believe to be palpable and true.