Hard on the heels of the snow came a frost that put shackles on the very wind. It fell black and sudden on the country, turning the mud floors of the poorer dwellings into iron that rang below the heel, though the peat-fires burned by day and night, and Loch Finne, lying flat as a girdle from shore to shore, crisped and curdled into ice on the surface in the space of an afternoon. A sun almost genial to look at, but with no warmth at the heart of him, rode among the white hills that looked doubly massive with their gullies and cornes, for ordinary black or green, lost in the general hue, and at mid-day bands of little white birds would move over the country from the north, flapping weakly to a warmer clime. They might stay a little, some of them, deceived by the hanging peat-smoke into the notion that somewhere here were warmth and comfort; but the cold searched them to the core, and such as did not die on the roadside took up their dismal voyaging anew.
The very deer came down from the glens--cabarfeidh stags, hinds, and prancing roes. At night we could hear them bellowing and snorting as they went up and down the street in herds from Ben Bhrec or the barren sides of the Black Mount and Dalness in the land of Bredalbane, seeking the shore and the travellers’ illusion--the content that’s always to come. In those hours, too, the owls seemed to surrender the fir-woods and come to the junipers about the back-doors, for they keened in the darkness, even on, woeful warders of the night, telling the constant hours.
Twas in these bitter nights, shivering under blanket and plaid, I thought ruefully of foreign parts, of the frequented towns I had seen elsewhere, the cleanly paven streets, swept of snow, the sea-coal fires, and the lanterns swinging over the crowded causeways, signs of friendly interest and companionship. Here were we, poor peasants, in a waste of frost and hills, cut off from the merry folks sitting by fire and flame at ease! Even our gossiping, our ceilidh in each other’s houses, was stopped; except in the castle itself no more the song and story, the pipe and trump.
In the morning when one ventured abroad he found the deer-slot dimpling all the snow on the street, and down at the shore, unafeared of man, would be solitary hinds, widows and rovers from their clans, sniffing eagerly over to the Cowal hills. Poor beasts! poor beasts! I’ve seen them in their madness take to the ice for it when it was little thicker than a groat, thinking to reach the oak-woods of Ardchyline. For a time the bay at the river mouth was full of long-tailed ducks, that at a whistle almost came to your hand, and there too came flocks of wild-swan, flying in wedges, trumpeting as they flew. Fierce otters quarrelled over their eels at the mouth of the Black Burn that flows underneath the town and out below the Tolbooth to the shore, or made the gloaming melancholy with their doleful whistle. A roebuck in his winter jacket of mouse-brown fur died one night at my relative’s door, and a sea-eagle gorged himself so upon the carcass that at morning he could not flap a wing, and fell a ready victim to a knock from my staff.
The passes to the town were head-high with drifted snow, our warders at the heads of Aora and Shira could not themselves make out the road, and the notion of added surety this gave us against Antrim’s Irishmen was the only compensation for the ferocity of nature.
In three days the salt loch, in that still and ardent air, froze like a fishpond, whereupon the oddest spectacle ever my country-side saw was his that cared to rise at morning to see it. Stags and hinds in tremendous herds, black cattle, too, from the hills, trotted boldly over the ice to the other side of the loch, that in the clarity of the air seemed but a mile off. Behind them went skulking foxes, pole-cats, badgers, cowering hares, and bead-eyed weasels. They seemed to have a premonition that Famine was stalking behind them, and they fled our luckless woods and fields like rats from a sinking ship.
To Master Gordon I said one morning as we watched a company of dun heifers mid-way on the loch, “This is an ill omen or I’m sore mistaken.”
He was not a man given to superstitions, but he could not gainsay me. “There’s neither hip nor haw left in our woods,” he said; “birds I’ve never known absent here in the most eager winters are gone, and wild-eyed strangers, their like never seen here before, tamely pick crumbs at my very door. Signs! signs! It beats me sometimes to know how the brute scents the circumstance to come, but--whats the Word?--‘Not a sparrow shall fall.’”
We fed well on the wild meat driven to our fireside, and to it there never seemed any end, for new flocks took up the tale of the old ones, and a constant procession of fur and feather moved across our white prospect. Even the wolf--from Benderloch no doubt--came baying at night at the empty gibbets at the town-head, that spoke of the law’s suspense.
Only in Castle Inneraora was there anything to be called gaiety. MacCailein fumed at first at the storm that kept his letters from him and spoiled the laburnums and elms he was coaxing to spring about his garden; but soon he settled down to his books and papers, ever his solace in such homely hours as the policy and travel of his life permitted. And if the burgh was dull and dark, night after night there was merriment over the drawbrig of the castle. It would be on the 10th or the 15th of the month that I first sampled it I went up with a party from the town and neighbourhood, with their wives and daughters, finding an atmosphere wondrous different from that of the cooped and anxious tenements down below. Big logs roared behind the fire-dogs, long candles and plenty lit the hall, and pipe and harp went merrily. Her ladyship had much of the French manner--a dainty dame with long thin face and bottle shoulders, attired always in Saxon fashion, and indulgent in what I then thought a wholesome levity, that made up for the Gruamach husband. And she thought him, honestly, the handsomest and noblest in the world, though she rallied him for his overmuch sobriety of deportment. To me she was very gracious, for she had liked my mother, and I think she planned to put me in the way of the Provost’s daughter as often as she could.
When his lordship was in his study, our daffing was in Gaelic, for her ladyship, though a Morton, and only learning the language, loved to have it spoken about her. Her pleasure was to play the harp--a clarsach of great beauty, with Iona carving on it--to the singing of her daughter Jean, who knew all the songs of the mountains and sang them like the bird. The town girls, too, sang, Betty a little shyly, but as daintily as her neighbours, and we danced a reel or two to the playing of Paruig Dall, the blind piper. Venison and wine were on the board, and whiter bread than the town baxters afforded. It all comes back on me now--that lofty hall, the skins of seal and otter and of stag upon the floor, the flaring candles and the glint of glass and silver, the banners swinging upon the walls over devices of pike, gun, and claymore--the same to be used so soon!
The castle, unlike its successor, sat adjacent to the river-side, its front to the hill of Dunchuach on the north, and its back a stone-cast from the mercat cross and the throng street of the town. Between it and the river was the small garden consecrate to her ladyship’s flowers, a patch of level soil, cut in dice by paths whose tiny pebbles and broken shells crunched beneath the foot at any other season than now when the snow covered all.
John Splendid, who was of our party, in a lull of the entertainment was looking out at the prospect from a window at the gable end of the hall, for the moon sailed high above Strone, and the outside world was beautiful in a cold and eerie fashion. Of a sudden he faced round and beckoned to me with a hardly noticeable toss of the head.
I went over and stood beside him. He was bending a little to get the top of Dunchuach in the field of his vision, and there was a puzzled look on his face.
“Do you see any light up yonder?” he asked, and I followed his query with a keen scrutiny of the summit, where the fort should be lying in darkness and peace.
There was a twinkle of light that would have shown fuller if the moonlight were less.
“I see a spark,” I said, wondering a little at his interest in so small an affair.
“That’s a pity,” said he, in a rueful key. “I was hoping it might be a private vision of my own, and yet I might have known my dream last night of a white rat meant something. If that’s flame there’s more to follow. There should be no lowe on this side of the fort after nightfall, unless the warders on the other side have news from the hills behind Dunchuach. In this matter of fire at night Dunchuach echoes Ben Bhuidhe or Ben Bhrec, and these two in their turn carry on the light of our friends farther ben in Bredalbane and Cruachan. It’s not a state secret to tell you we were half feared some of our Antrim gentry might give us a call; but the Worst Curse on the pigs who come guesting in such weather!”
He was glowering almost feverishly at the hill-top, and I turned round to see that the busy room had no share in our apprehension. The only eyes I found looking in our direction were those of Betty, who finding herself observed, came over, blushing a little, and looked out into the night.
“You were hiding the moonlight from me,” she said with a smile, a remark which struck me as curious, for she could not, from where she sat, see out at the window.
“I never saw one who needed it less,” said Splendid, and still he looked intently at the mount. “You carry your own with you.”
Having no need to bend, she saw the top of Dun-chuach whenever she got close to the window, and by this time the light on it looked like a planet, wan in the moonlight, but unusually large and angry.
“I never saw star so bright,” said the girl, in a natural enough error.
“A challenge to your eyes, madam,” retorted Splendid again, in a raillery wonderful considering his anxiety, and he whispered in my ear--“or to us to war.”
As he spoke, the report of a big gun boomed through the frosty air from Dunchuach to the plain, and the beacon flashed up, tall, flaunting, and unmistakable.
John Splendid turned into the hall and raised his voice a little, to say with no evidence of disturbance--
“There’s something amiss up the glens, your ladyship.”
The harp her ladyship strummed idly on at the moment had stopped on a ludicrous and unfinished note, the hum of conversation ended abruptly. Up to the window the company crowded, and they could see the balefire blazing hotly against the cool light of the moon and the widely sprinkled stars. Behind them in a little came Argile, one arm only thrust hurriedly in a velvet jacket, his hair in a disorder, the pallor of study on his cheek. He very gently pressed to the front, and looked out with a lowering brow at the signal.
“Ay, ay!” he said in the English, after a pause that kept the room more intent on his face than on the balefire. “My old luck bides with me. I thought the weather guaranteed me a season’s rest, but here’s the claymore again! Alasdair, Craignish, Sir Donald, I wish you gentlemen would set the summons about with as little delay as need be. We have no time for any display of militant science, but as these beacons carry their tale fast we may easily be at the head of Glen Aora before the enemy is down Glenurchy.”
Sir Donald, who was the eldest of the officers his lordship addressed, promised a muster of five hundred men in three hours’ time. “I can have a crois-tara,” he said, “at the very head of Glen Shira in an hour.”
“You may save yourself the trouble,” said John Splendid; “Glen Shira’s awake by this time, for the watchers have been in the hut on Ben Bhuidhe since ever we came back from Lorn, and they are in league with other watchers at the Gearron town, who will have the alarm miles up the Glen by now if I make no mistake about the breed.”
By this time a servant came in to say Sithean Sluaidhe hill on Cowal was ablaze, and likewise the hill of Ardno above the Ardkinglas lands.
“The alarm will be over Argile in two hours,” said his lordship. “We’re grand at the beginnings of things,” and as he spoke he was pouring, with a steady hand, a glass of wine for a woman in the tremors. “I wish to God we were better at the endings,” he added, bitterly. “If these Athole and Antrim caterans have the secret of our passes, we may be rats in a trap before the morn’s morning.”
The hall emptied quickly, a commotion of folks departing rose in the courtyard, and candle and torch moved about. Horses put over the bridge at a gallop, striking sparks from the cobble-stones, swords jingled on stirrups. In the town, a piper’s tune hurriedly lifted, and numerous lights danced to the windows of the burghers. John Splendid, the Marquis, and I were the only ones left in the hall, and the Marquis turned to me with a smile--
“You see your pledge calls for redemption sooner than you expected, Elrigmore. The enemy’s not far from Ben Bhuidhe now, and your sword is mine by the contract.”
“Your lordship can count on me to the last ditch,” I cried; and indeed I might well be ready, for was not the menace of war as muckle against my own hearth as against his?
“Our plan,” he went on, “as agreed upon at a council after my return from the north, was to hold all above Inneraora in simple defence while lowland troops took the invader behind. Montrose or the Mac Donalds can’t get through our passes.”
“I’m not cock-sure of that, MacCailein,” said Splendid. “We’re here in the bottom of an ashet; there’s more than one deserter from your tartan on the outside of it, and once they get on the rim they have, by all rules strategic, the upper hand of us in some degree. I never had much faith (if I dare make so free) in the surety of our retreat here. It’s an old notion of our grandads that we could bar the passes.”
“So we can, sir, so we can!” said the Marquis, nervously picking at his buttons with his long white fingers, the nails vexatiously polished and shaped.
“Against horse and artillery, I allow, surely not against Gaelic foot. This is not a wee foray of broken men, but an attack by an army of numbers. The science of war--what little I learned of it in the Low Countries with gentlemen esteemed my betters--convinces me that if a big enough horde fall on from the rim of our ashet, as I call it, they might sweep us into the loch like rattons.”
I doubt MacCailein Mor heard little of this uncheery criticism, for he was looking in a seeming blank abstraction out of the end window at the town lights increasing in number as the minutes passed. His own piper in the close behind the buttery had tuned up and into the gathering--
“Bha mi air banais ‘am bail’ Inneraora. Banais bu mhiosa bha riamh air an t-saoghal!”
I felt the tune stir me to the core, and M’Iver, I could see by the twitch of his face, kindled to the old call.
“Curse them!” cried MacCailein; “Curse them!” he cried in the Gaelic, and he shook a white fist foolishly at the north; “I’m wanting but peace and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be snapping like curs at Argile. God’s name! and I’ll crush them like ants on the ant-heap.”
From the door at the end of the room, as he stormed, a little bairn toddled in, wearing a night-shirt, a curly gold-haired boy with his cheeks like the apple for hue, the sleep he had risen from still heavy on his eyes. Seemingly the commotion had brought him from his bed, and up he now ran, and his little arms went round his father’s knees. On my word I’ve seldom seen a man more vastly moved than was Archibald, Marquis of Argile. He swallowed his spittle as if it were wool, and took the child to his arms awkwardly, like one who has none of the handling of his own till they are grown up, and I could see the tear at the cheek he laid against the youth’s ruddy hair.
“Wild men coming!” said the child, not much put about after all.
“They shan’t touch my little Illeasbuig,” whispered his lordship, kissing him on the mouth. Then he lifted his head and looked hard at John Splendid. “I think,” he said, “if I went post-haste to Edinburgh, I could be of some service in advising the nature and route of the harassing on the rear of Montrose. Or do you think--do you think----?”
He ended in a hesitancy, flushing a little at the brow, his lips weakening at the corner.
John Splendid, at my side, gave me with his knee the least nudge on the leg next him.
“Did your lordship think of going to Edinburgh at once?” he asked, with an odd tone in his voice, and keeping his eyes very fixedly on a window.
“If it was judicious, the sooner the better,” said the Marquis, nuzzling his face in the soft warmth of the child’s neck.
Splendid looked helpless for a bit, and then took up the policy that I learned later to expect from him in every similar case. He seemed to read (in truth it was easy enough!) what was in his master’s mind, and he said, almost with gaiety--
“The best thing you could do, my lord. Beyond your personal encouragement (and a Chiefs aye a consoling influence on the field, I’ll never deny), there’s little you could do here that cannot, with your pardon, be fairly well done by Sir Donald and myself, and Elrigmore here, who have made what you might call a trade of tulzie and brulzie.”
MacCailein Mor looked uneasy for all this open assurance. He set the child down with an awkward kiss, to be taken away by a servant lass who had come after him.
“Would it not look a little odd!” he said, eyeing us keenly.
“Your lordship might be sending a trusty message to Edinburgh,” I said; and John Splendid with a “Pshaw!” walked to the window, saying what he had to say with his back to the candle-light.
“There’s not a man out there but would botch the whole business if you sent him,” he said; “it must be his lordship or nobody. And what’s to hinder her ladyship and the children going too? Snugger they’d be by far in Stirling Lodge than here, I’ll warrant. If I were not an old runt of a bachelor, it would be my first thought to give my women and bairns safety.”
MacCailein flew at the notion. “Just so, just so,” he cried, and of a sudden he skipped out of the room.
John Splendid turned, pushed the door to after the nobleman, and in a soft voice broke into the most terrible torrent of bad language ever I heard (and I’ve known cavaliers of fortune free that way). He called his Marquis everything but a man.
“Then why in the name of God do you urge him on to a course that a fool could read the poltroonery of? I never gave MacCailein Mor credit for being a coward before,” said I.
“Coward!” cried Splendid. “It’s no cowardice but selfishness--the disease, more or less, of us all. Do you think yon gentleman a coward? Then you do not know the man. I saw him once, empty-handed, in the forest, face the white stag and beat it off a hunter it was goring to death, and they say he never blenched when the bonnet was shot off his head at Drimtyne, but jested with a ‘Close on’t: a nail-breadth more, and Colin was heir to an earlhood!’”
“I’m sorry to think the worst of an Argile and a Campbell, but surely his place is here now.”
“It is, I admit; and I egged him to follow his inclination because I’m a fool in one thing, as you’ll discover anon, because ifs easier and pleasanter to convince a man to do what he wants to do than to convince him the way he would avoid is the only right one.”
“It’s not an altogether nice quirk of the character,” I said, drily. It gave me something of a stroke to find so weak a bit in a man of so many notable parts.
He spunked up like tinder.
“Do you call me a liar?” he said, with a face as white as a clout, his nostrils stretching in his rage.
“Liar!” said I, “not I. It would be an ill time to do it with our common enemy at the door. A lie (as I take it in my own Highland fashion) is the untruth told for cowardice or to get a mean advantage of another: your way with MacCailein was but a foolish way (also Highland, I’ve noticed) of saving yourself the trouble of spurring up your manhood to put him in the right.”
“You do me less than half justice,” said Splendid, the blood coming back to his face, and him smiling again; “I allow I’m no preacher. If a man must to hell, he must, his own gait. The only way I can get into argument with him about the business is to fly in a fury. If I let my temper up I would call MacCailein coward to his teeth, though I know it’s not his character. But I’ve been in a temper with my cousin before now, and I ken the stuff he’s made of: he gets as cold as steel the hotter I get, and with the poorest of causes he could then put me in a black confusion----”
“But you----”
“Stop, stop! let me finish my tale. Do you know, I put a fair face on the black business to save the man his own self-respect. He’ll know himself his going looks bad without my telling him, and I would at least leave him the notion that we were blind to his weakness. After all it’s not much of a weakness--the wish to save a wife and children from danger. Another bookish disease, I admit: their over-much study has deadened the man to a sense of the becoming, and in an affair demanding courage he acts like a woman, thinking of his household when he should be thinking of his clan. My only consolation is that after all (except for the look of the thing) his leaving us matters little.”
I thought different on that point, and I proved right. If it takes short time to send a fiery cross about, it takes shorter yet to send a naughty rumour, and the story that MacCailein Mor and his folks were off in a hurry to the Lowlands was round the greater part of Argile before the clansmen mustered at Inneraora. They never mustered at all, indeed, for the chieftains of the small companies that came from Glen Finne and down the country no sooner heard that the Marquis was off than they took the road back, and so Montrose and Colkitto MacDonald found a poltroon and deserted countryside waiting them.
