THE RUINED COTTAGE.
'Those who do injuries to others,' says the delightful author of _I
promessè Sposi_, 'are not only accountable for the evil they inflict,
but also for the perversion of sentiment which they cause in their
victims.' I am happy that this trite sentence occurred to me, for by
this mode of reasoning we shall find Mr. Snaggs alone guilty of
Callum's unusual hardness of heart, and, in short, the author of his
own untimely demise.
Chilled and almost terrified by the new and awful events of the
night, I hastened away by the route we had come, descending the face
of the rocks towards that part of the stream which lay below the
cascade, and proceeding along its banks among the wet water-docks and
green leaves which the fire, that was still raging in many parts of
the muirland district. had failed to consume. Midnight was past
now. The moon was waning behind the summit of the scorched and
burning hills. We were weary and looked about us for a shelter; but
in every direction the country seemed dotted by the fires which yet
smouldered in the thickets and morasses, reddening and flashing in
every puff of wind.
'Free--but homeless, houseless, penniless, and desperate!' said I.
'A chial!' responded my fosterer; 'how many brethren we have in this
wide world, which is all before us now!'
A ruined cottage afforded us a resting-place, and there we threw
ourselves down upon the thick soft grass that was springing up within
its four bare walls of turf and boulder-stones. I was so overcome by
lassitude, that even the supernatural terrors of this place failed to
scare me from it, and Callum, who would rather have passed the night
in any other part of the mountains, could not leave me. A mouthful
of whisky from his hunting-flask revived us, and to change the
current of my thoughts, which were incessantly and upbraidingly
reverting to the terrible scenes we had just witnessed, he told me
several wild and quaint stories of Dougald-with-the-Keys, the former
occupant of the ruined cottage, and in whose service Callum had been
when a boy.
Dougald was a smuggler and distiller of illicit spirits. He had his
manufactory in a hollow of the adjacent morass, a high rock
overlooking which was the post of his scout. Malie, his lynx-eyed
wife, generally watched for the hated exciseman, who might be
wandering along the road from Inverness or Tain. He was named
Dougald-with-the-Keys, from a bunch of mysterious keys which he bore
at his sporran-belt. These rattled when he walked, and gave him, it
was averred, a mysterious power; for once, when conveying to
Inverness two casks of the mountain-dew, slung across a stout pony,
two excisemen gave him chase, and being well mounted, were about to
make a capture of Dougald's distillation; but near the source of the
Ora he shook his keys at them, and plucking a sprig of rowan, planted
it by the wayside, uttering certain strange and terrible words. On
approaching the sprig, the pursuers felt themselves constrained to
alight from their saddles, and to dance round it furiously,
hand-in-hand, while Dougald laughed and proceeded safely on his
journey towards the Highland capital. The frantic and involuntary
gyrations of the unfortunate excisemen were continued for more than
two hours, until a passing shepherd pulled up the rowan-sprig,
dissolved the spell, and permitted them to fall prostrate on the
road, breathless, powerless, terrified, and resolved never more to
meddle with Dougald, who continued to smuggle and distil in success
and security, and had large sums to his credit, standing in the books
of various discreet retailers in the vicinity of the Clachnacudden.
Once upon a time Callum had been despatched thither for payment, and
was returning to the glen with a purse well filled with silver
'Georges,' and mounted on the active shelty which usually carried the
casks. Pleased with the large sum he had to pay over to the gloomy,
fierce, and avaricious Dougald, he switched up the nag as he entered
the glen, and hastened on, for the double purpose of ridding himself
of this important cash, and obtaining his supper.
The cottage and its little outhouses were buried in obscurity when he
approached them; all was dark, yet the hour was not late, and, save a
real or fancied sound of lamentation, all was still. According to
his usual custom, Callum rode straight to the stable door, slipped
from the bare-backed pony, which he had ridden in the Highland
fashion, in his kilt, sans bridle and crupper. On opening the door,
for the purpose of bedding and foddering the little nag, he heard a
well-known rattling of keys. The sound seemed to be in the air! The
pony started--snorted--perspired and trembled; its eyes shot fire;
its fore-feet were firmly planted on the ground, and remained
immovable. Again the keys were heard rattling, and between him and
the moon, Callum saw the figure of Dougald pass like a shadow along
the summit of the little garden wall. The pony then sprang into the
stable with a convulsive bound. An indescribable emotion--a horror
filled the heart of my fosterer; and closing his eyes, lest he might
see something still more appalling, he flung down a few armfuls of
hay and straw to the pony, locked the stable door, and sprang into
the cottage, to find Dougald stretched on the floor, a corpse, and
his wife, Malie, lamenting over him; for at the instant Callum had
seen his figure passing, as it were, through the air, he had sunk
down and expired of some disease unknown.
Such stories as these, and others, Callum related in low and
impressive whispers, and his powerful and poetical Gaelic, which
invested every trifle with pathos or with terror, were but ill
calculated to soothe a mind which ever and anon in fancy saw the pale
visage and glaring eyes of Snaggs; thus I was glad when the breaking
day began to brighten in the east, and we left the ruined hut of
Dougald the Smuggler to survey the country, which was all black,
burned, and desolate. Its aspect was strange and terrible; a sea of
flame seemed to have rolled over it, sweeping every trace of life and
verdure from its surface. The origin of that nocturnal fire was then
involved in mystery; but the game over eighteen square miles was
irretrievably destroyed, and Callum laughed in scorn.
'_Let this be a hint_ for our Highlanders!' said he.
The desolation of the scene was now complete, as that which Abraham
saw of old, when looking towards the cities of the Doomed, he beheld
the smoke of The Land of the Plain, ascending as the smoke of a
furnace. A stripe of green was lingering on the lofty places, but
all was scorched below; thus
"In mountain or in glen,
Nor tree, nor plant, nor shrub, nor flower,
Nor aught of vegetative power,
The wearied eye may ken;
But all its rocks at random thrown,
Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone."
All this occurred only three years ago, but subsequent events have
rendered the concealment of poor Callum's name unnecessary now.
Three days elapsed before the fire exhausted itself, or was
extinguished, on the thickets being cut down in some places by the
axe, and the heather torn up in others, to bar their progress.
Meanwhile the sufferings of the poor evicted people, who were
bivouacked in the burial-ground of St. Colme, had been terrible. In
their hunger and despair, some of them had made a species of meal or
flour from the leaves and seed of the wild mustard, and bruising them
together, had kneaded a kind of cake, which, when eaten with mountain
herbs, brought on deadly inflammations and fluxes, of which they died
so fast, that the frightful condition of the survivors reached the
ears of the humane in the Lowlands. But why dwell on a subject that
is of daily occurrence in the Scottish Highlands, and with the hourly
horrors of which the columns of the northern press are constantly
filled?
A subscription was prepared for them, in common with the miserable
Rosses, who were then being driven out of Sutherland, and the starved
Mac Donnels, who were then hunted down like wild beasts in Glenelg;
but this relief was soon abandoned, through the malevolence of the
usual enemy of the Celtic population--a scurrilous Edinburgh print,
of which Mac Fee, in common with other small wits of the Scottish
Parliament House, was of course a supporter. Charity thus arrested
and withheld, the result proved most fatal to the poor people of Glen
Ora, who died daily--the strong man and the tender child together.
At last, as I have stated, the authorities, who had been packing our
peasantry in ships like negroes from Africa, and despatching them in
naked hordes from Isle Ornsay and elsewhere to America and Australia,
proposed to the miserable remnant of the Mac Innons that they too
should sail for that far-off land of the West, where the sun of the
Celtic tribes is setting, and with something of despair they
consented, for the most cruel and terrible ultimatum--death by
starvation and exposure menaced them all.
I will pass over the touching scenes that ensued when the last of our
people were torn from their native district, every feature and memory
of which were entwined around their hearts--torn from their ruined
homes--their father's lonely graves--from all they had loved since
childhood, and when they were thrust, without regard to sex or age,
on board of a small steamer in Loch Ora, for conveyance to Glasgow,
where the great emigrant--or Celtic slave-ship, the _Duchess_,
awaited them.
Many of these poor people, after the usual custom of the evicted
Highlanders, made up little packages of earth--their native soil---to
bear it with them to the wilds of America, as a relic or memento of
their country; and in the hope that, in this little handful might be
the seeds of the heather-bell and other native plants and flowers.
Strong, deep, and undying is this pure and noble--this holy love of
home, in the Highland heart. The unavailing sorrow, the unheeded
agony, the mental and bodily misery of our evicted emigrants is a
theme so constantly before the public, that we now regard the
depopulation of a valley as quite a usual occurrence, like the fall
of the leaf or the coming of summer; hence I will pass over this part
of iny narrative as briefly as possible.
The people sailed for Glasgow, and Callum and I, who were to follow
and join them in a day or two, stood on the shore of the loch, and
saw the steamer ploughing through its still blue waters, as it bore
away the sad and wailing freight.
Near us, on the beach, knelt a man in prayer; his white hairs were
glistening in the setting sun; his eyes were bent upon the lessening
steamer, and his hands were stretched towards her. This was old
Father Raouil, who was sending his last blessing after those on whose
faces he would never look again.
Near him knelt Callum Dhu, with his bare knees in the sand, and his
rough sunburned face covered by his bonnet--for the strong man had
now given way, and was weeping like a child.
We are literally _the last of the clan_.
We watched the steamer till she diminished to a speck, and vanished
round a promontory; then we turned away, and, mechanically and in
silence, ascended the desolate mountains, a community of thought--a
unity of sentiment--leading us instinctively towards the deserted
glen, although neither home nor tie remained unto us there.