John Splendid Part 20

Songs will be failing from the memory in the ranging of the years, the pa.s.sions that rose to them of old burned low in the ash, so that many of the sweetest ditties I heard on that night in Glen Noe have long syne left me for ever--all but one that yet I hum to the children at my knee.

It was one of John Splendid's; the words and air were his as well as the performance of them, and though the English is a poor language wherein to render any fine Gaelic sentiment, I cannot forbear to give something of its semblance here. He called it in the Gaelic "The Sergeant of Pikes," and a few of its verses as I mind them might be Scotticed so--

When I sat in the service o' foreign commanders, Selling a sword for a beggar man's fee, Learning the trade o' the warrior who wanders, To mak' ilka stranger a sworn enemie; There was ae thought that nerved roe, and brawly it served me.

With pith to the claymore wherever I won,-- 'Twas the auld sodger's story, that, gallows or glory, The Hielan's, the Hielan's were crying me on!

I tossed upon swinging seas, splashed to my kilted knees, Ocean or ditch, it was ever the same; In leaguer or sally, tattoo or revally, The message on every pibroch that came, Was "Cruachan, Cruachan, O son remember us, Think o' your fathers and never be slack!"

Blade and buckler together, though far off the heather, The Hielan's, the Hielan's were all at my back!

The ram to the gate-way, the torch to the tower, We rifled the kist, and the cattle we maimed; Our dirks stabbed at guess through the leaves o' the bower, And crimes we committed that needna be named: Moonlight or dawning grey, Lammas or Lady-day, Donald maun dabble his plaid in the gore; He maun hough and maun harry, or should he miscarry, The Hielan's, the Hielan's will own him no more!

And still, O strange Providence! mirk is your mystery, Whatever the country that chartered our steel Because o' the valiant repute o' our history, The love o' our ain land we maistly did feel; Many a misty glen, many a sheiling pen, Rose to our vision when slogans rang high; And this was the solace bright came to our starkest fight, A' for the Hielan's, the Hielan's we die!

A Sergeant o' Pikes, I have pushed and have parried O (My heart still at tether in bonny Glenshee); Weary the marches made, sad the towns harried O, But in fancy the heather was aye at my knee: The hill-berry mellowing, stag o' ten bellowing, The song o' the fold and the tale by the hearth, Bairns at the crying and auld folks a-dying, The Hielan's sent wi' me to fight round the earth!

O the Hielan's, the Hielan's, praise G.o.d for His favour, That ane sae unworthy should heir sic estate, That gi'ed me the zest o the sword, and the savour That lies in the loving as well as the hate.

Auld age may subdue me, a grim death be due me, For even a Sergeant o' Pikes maun depart, But I'll never complain o't, whatever the pain o't, The Hielan's, the Hielan's were aye at my heart!

We closed in our night's diversion with the exercise of prayer, wherein two clerics led our devotion, one Master Mungo Law, a Lowlander, and the other his lordship's chaplain--Master Alexander Gordon, who had come on this expedition with some fire of war in his face, and never so much as a stiletto at his waist.

They prayed a trifle long and drearily the pair of them, and both in the English that most of our clansmen but indifferently understood. They prayed as prayed David, that the counsel of Ahithophel might be turned to foolishness; and "Lo," they said, "be strong and courageous; fear not, neither be afraid of the King of Ashur, neither for all the mult.i.tude that is with him; for there be more with us than with him,"

and John Splendid turned to me at this with a dry laugh.

"Colin, my dear," said he, "thus the hawk upon the mountain-side, and the death of the winged eagle to work up a valour for! 'There be more with us than with him.' I never heard it so bluntly put before. But perhaps Heaven will forgive us the sin of our caution, seeing that half our superior number are but Lowland levies."

And all night long deer belled to deer on the braes of Glen Noe.

CHAPTER XVII.--IN THE LAND OF LORN.

We might well be at our prayers. Appin paid dearly for its merriment in the land of Cailein Mor, and the MacDonalds were mulct most generously for our every hoof and horn. For when we crossed Loch Etive there came behind us from the ruined glens of Lower Lorn hordes of shepherds, hunters, small men of small families, who left their famished dens and holes, hunger sharping them at the nose, the dead bracken of concealment in their hair, to join in the vengeance on the cause of their distress.

Without chieftains or authority, they came in savage bands, affronting the sea with their shouts as they swam or ferried; they made up with the wildest of our troops, and ho, ro! for the plaids far and wide on the errands of h.e.l.l. In that clear, cold, white weather--the weather of the badger's dream, as our proverb calls it--we brought these glens unfriendly, death in the black draught and the red wine of fire. A madness of hate seized on us; we glutted our appet.i.tes to the very gorge. I must give Argile the credit of giving no licence to our on-goings. He rode after us with his Lowlanders, protesting, threatening, cajoling in vain. Many a remonstrance, too, made Gordon, many an opening fire he stamped out in cot and bam. But the black smoke of the granary belching against the white hills, or the kyloe, houghed and maimed, roaring in its agony, or the fugitive brought b.l.o.o.d.y on his knees among the rocks--G.o.d's mercy!

Do you know why those unco spectacles were sometimes almost sweet to me, though I was more often a looker-on than a sharer in their horror? It was because I never saw a barn blaze in Appin or Glencoe but I minded on our own black barns in Shira Glen; nor a beast slashed at the sinew with a wanton knife, but I thought of Moira, the dappled one that was the pride of my mother's byre, made into hasty collops for a Stewart meal.

Through this remoter Lorn I went, less conscious of cruelty than when I plied fire and sword with legitimate men of war, for ever in my mind was the picture of real Argile, scorched to the vitals with the invading flame, and a burgh town I cherished reft of its people, and a girl with a child at her neck flying and sobbing among the hills.

Montrose and MacColkitto were far before us, marching up the Great Glen.

They had with them the pick of the clans, so we lived, as it were, at free quarters, and made up for weeks of short fare by a time of high feeding.

Over Etive and through the Benderloch, and through Appin and even up to Glencoe, by some strange spasm of physique--for she was frail and famished--the barefooted old _cailleach_ of Carnus came after us, a bird of battle, croaking in a horrible merriment over our operations. The Dark Dame we called her. She would dance round the butchery of the fold, chanting her venomous Gaelic exultation in uncouth rhymes that she strung together as easily as most old people of her kind can do such things in times of pa.s.sion or trance. She must have lived like a vulture, for no share would she have in our pots, though sometimes she added a relish to them by fetching dainties from houses by the way, whose larders in our masculine ignorance we had overlooked.

"I would give thee the choicest of the world," she would say. "What is too good for my heroes, O heroes of the myrtle-badge?"

"Sit down and pick," John Splendid bade her once, putting a roysterer's playful arm round her waist, and drawing her to the fire where a dinner stewed.

Up she threw her claws, and her teeth were at his neck with a weasel's instinct But she drew back at a gleam of reason.

"Oh, darling, darling," she cried, patting him with her foul hands, "did I not fancy for the moment thou wert of the spoilers of my home and honour--thou, the fleet foot, the avenger, the gentleman with an account to pay--on thee this mother's blessing, for thee this widow's prayers!"

M'Iver was more put about at her friendliness than at her ferocity, as he shook his plaiding to order and fell back from her worship.

"I've seldom seen a more wicked cat," said he; "go home, grandam, and leave us to our business. If they find you in Lochaber they will gralloch you like a Yule hind."

She leered, witch-like, at him, clutched suddenly at his sword-hilt, and kissed it with a frenzy of words, then sped off, singing madly as she flew.

We left the Dark Dame on Levenside as we ferried over to Lochaber, and the last we saw of her, she stood knee-deep in the water, calling, calling, calling, through the grey dun morning, a curse on Clan Donald and a blessing on Argile.

His lordship sat at the helm of a barge, his face pallid and drawn with cold, and he sighed heavily as the beldame's cries came after us.

"There's little of G.o.d's grace in such an omen," said he, in English, looking at the dim figure on the sh.o.r.e, and addressing Gordon.

"It could happen nowhere else," said the cleric, "but in such a ferocious land. I confess it, my lord--I confess it with the bitter shame of surrender, that I behold generations of superst.i.tion and savagery still to beat down ere your people are so amenable to the Gospel as the folks of the Lowland shires. To them such a shrieking harridan would be an object of pity and stern measure; they would call her mad as an etter-cap, and keep her in bounds: here she is made something of a prophetess------"

"How?" asked Argile, shortly, and he was looking wistfully at the hills we were leaving--the hills that lay between him and his books.

"There's not a Highlander in your corps but has bowed his head to her blessing; there's not one but looks upon her curse of the MacDonalds as so much of a gain in this enterprise."

"Oh," said his lordship, "you are a little extravagant We have our foolish ways, Gordon, but we are not altogether heathen; and do you think that after all there might not be something in the portents of a witch like yon in her exaltation?"

"No more than's in the howling of the wind in the chimney," said Gordon, quickly.

"Perhaps not," said Argile, after a little, "perhaps not; but even the piping of the vent has something of prophecy in it, though the wind bloweth where it listeth. I have only a scholar's interest in these things, I give you my word, and----"

He laughed with a little restraint before he went on.

"Do you know, John," he called out to M'Iver--"do you know what our _cailleach_ friend says of our jaunt? She put a head in at my tent last night, and 'Listen, MacCailein,' said she, 'and keep on high roads,'

said she, 'and Inverlochy's a perilous place,' said she, 'and I'd be wae to see the heather above the gall.'"

John Splendid's back was to him as he sat at the prow of a boat coming close on our stern, but I saw the skin of his neck flame. He never turned: he made no answer for a moment, and when he spoke it was with a laughing allusion in English to the folly of portents.

This was so odd an att.i.tude for a man usually superst.i.tious to take up, that I engaged him on the point whenever we landed.

"You seem to have no great respect for the Dark Dame's wizardy," said I.

He took me aside from some of the clansmen who could overhear.

"Never let these lads think that you either lightly Dame Dubh or make overmuch of her talk about the heather and gall, for they prize her blessing, strangely enough, and they might lay too great stress on its failure. You catch me?"

I nodded to keep him going, and turned the thing over in my mind.

"What do you think of the prophecy yourself?" he asked; "is it not familiar?"

In a flash it came to my mind that I had half-hinted to him at what the Macaulay woman had said in the fold of Elrigmore.

"I think," said I, "the less the brooding on these things the better."

If we had our own misgivings about the end of this jaunt, our companions had none. They plunged with hearts almost jocular into the woods on Lochaber's edge, in a bright sunshine that glinted on the boss of the target and on the hilt of the knife or sword, and we came by the middle of the day to the plain on which lay the castle of Inverlochy--a staunch quadrangular edifice with round towers at the angles, and surrounded by a moat that smelled anything but freshly. And there we lay for a base, and thence we sent out round Keppoch and Locheil some dashing companies that carried on the work we began in Athole.