John Splendid Part 27

"I think, too, I have not much more of a story to tell," said the minister, stiffly.

"And I think," said M'Iver, in a sudden hurry to be off, "that we might be moving from here. The head of the loch is the only way for us if we are to be off this unwholesome countryside by the mouth of the night."

It is likely we would have taken him at his word, and have risen and gone on his way to the east, where the narrowing of the loch showed that it was close on its conclusion; but the Stewart took from his knapsack some viands that gave a frantic edge to our appet.i.te and compelled us to stay and eat.

The day was drawing to its close, the sun, falling behind us, was pillowed on clouds of a rich crimson. For the first time, we noticed the signs of the relaxation of the austere season in the return of bird and beast to their familiar haunts. As the sun dipped the birds came out to the brae-side to catch his last ray, as they ever love to do. Whaups rose off the sand, and, following the gleam upon the braes, ascended from slope to slope, and the plover followed too, dipping his feet in the golden tide receding. On little fir-patches mounted numerous blackc.o.c.k of sheeny feather, and the owls began to hoot in the wood beyond.

CHAPTER XXII.--DAME DUBH.

We had eaten to the last crumb, and were ready to be going, when again I asked Gordon what had come over Argile.

"I'll tell you that," said he, bitterly; but as he began, some wildfowl rose in a startled flight to our right and whirred across the sky.

"There's some one coming," said M'Iver; "let us keep close together."

From where the wildfowl rose, the Dame Dubh, as we called the old woman of Carnus, came in our direction, half-running, half-walking through the snow. She spied us while she was yet a great way off, stopped a second as one struck with an arrow, then continued her progress more eagerly than ever, with high-piped cries and taunts at us.

"O cowards!" she cried; "do not face Argile, or the glens you belong to. Cowards, cowards, Lowland women, Glencoe's full of laughter at your disgrace!"

"Royal's my race, I'll not be laughed at!" cried Stewart.

"They cannot know of it already in Glencoe!" said M'Iver, appalled.

"Know it!" said the crone, drawing nearer and with still more frenzy; "Glencoe has songs on it already. The stench from Invcrlochy's in the air; it's a mock in Benderloch and Ardgour, it's a nightmare in Glenurchy, and the women are keening on the slopes of Cladich. Cowards, cowards, little men, cowards! all the curses of Conan on you and the black rocks; die from home, and h.e.l.l itself reject you!"

We stood in front of her in a group, slack at the arms and shoulders, bent a little at the head, affronted for the first time with the full shame of our disaster. All my bright portents of the future seemed, as they flashed again before me, muddy in the hue, an unfaithful man's remembrance of his sins when they come before him at the bedside of his wife; the evasions of my friends revealed themselves what they were indeed, the shutting of the eyes against shame.

The woman's meaning. Master Gordon could only guess at, and he faced her composedly.

"You are far off your road," he said to her mildly, but she paid him no heed.

"You have a bad tongue, mother," said M'Iver.

She turned and spat on his vest, and on him anew she poured her condemnation.

"_You_, indeed, the gentleman with an account to pay, the hero, the avenger! I wish my teeth had found your neck at the head of Aora Glen."

She stood in the half-night, foaming over with hate and evil words, her taunts stinging like asps.

"Take off the tartan, ladies!" she screamed; "off with men's apparel and on with the short-gown."

Her cries rang so over the land that she was a danger bruiting our presence to the whole neighbourhood, and it was in a common panic we ran with one accord from her in the direction of the loch-head. The man with the want took up the rear, whimpering as he ran, feeling again, it might be, a child fleeing from maternal chastis.e.m.e.nt: the rest of us went silently, all but Stewart, who was a c.o.c.ky little man with a large bonnet pulled down on the back of his head like a morion, to hide the absence of ears that had been cut off by the law for some of his Appin adventures. He was a person who never saw in most of a day's transactions aught but the humour of them, and as we ran from this shrieking beldame of Camus, he was choking with laughter at the ploy.

"Royal's my race," said he at the first ease to our running--"Royal's my race, and I never thought to run twice in one day from an enemy. Stop your greeting, Callum, and not be vexing our friends the gentlemen."

"What a fury!" said Master Gordon. "And that's the lady of omens! What about her blessing now?"

"Ay, and what about her prophecies?" asked M'Iver, sharply. "She was not so far wrong, I'm thinking, about the risks of Inverlochy; the heather's above the gall indeed."

"But at any rate," said I, "MacCailein's head is not on a pike."

"You must be always on the old key," cried M'Iver, angrily. "Oh man, man, but you're sore in want of tact" His face was throbbing and hoved.

"Here's half-a-dozen men," said he, "with plenty to occupy their wits with what's to be done and what's to happen them before they win home, and all your talk is on a most vexatious trifle. Have you found me, a cousin of the Marquis, anxious to query our friends here about the ins and outs of the engagement? It's enough for me that the heather's above the gall. I saw this dreary morning the sorrow of my life, and I'm in no hurry to add to it by the value of a single tear."

Sonachan was quite as bitter. "I don't think," said he, "that it matters very much to you, sir, what Argile may have done or may not have done; you should be glad of your luck (if luck it was and no design), that kept you clear of the trouble altogether." And again he plunged ahead of us with Ardkinglas, to avoid my retort to an impertinence that, coming from a younger man, would have more seriously angered me.

The minister by now had recovered his wind, and was in another of his sermon moods, with this ruffling at Mac-Cailein's name as his text.

"I think I can comprehend," said he, "all this unwillingness to talk about my lord of Argile's part in the disaster of to-day. No Gael though I am, I'm loath myself to talk about a bad black business, but that's because I love my master--for master he is in scholarship, in gifts, in every attribute and intention of the Christian soldier. It is for a different reason, I'm afraid, that our friend Barbreck shuffles."

"Barbreck never shuffles," said John, stiffly. "If he did in this matter, it would be for as true an affection for his chief as any lalland cleric ever felt for his patron."

"And yet, sir, you shuffle for another reason too. You do not want to give your ridiculous Highland pride the shock of hearing that your chief left in a galley before the battle he lost had well begun."

A curious cry came from M'Iver's lips. He lifted his face, lined with sudden shadows, to the stars that now were lighting to the east, and I heard his teeth grind.

"So that's the bitter end of it!" said I to myself, stunned by this pitiful conclusion. My mind groped back on the events of the whole waeful winter. I saw Argile again at peace among his own people; I heard anew his clerkly but wavering sentiment on the trade of the sword; I sat by him in the mouth of Glen Noe, and the song and the guess went round the fire. But the picture that came to me first and stayed with me last was Argile standing in his chamber in the castle of Inneraora, the pallor of the study on his face, and his little Archie, with his gold hair and the night-gown, running out and clasping him about the knees.

We struggled through the night, weary men, hungry men. Loch Leven-head may be bonny by day, but at night it is far from friendly to the unaccustomed wanderer. Swampy meadows frozen to the hard bone, and uncountable burns, and weary ascents, and alarming dips, lie there at the foot of the great forest of Mamore. And to us, poor fugitives, even these were less cruel than the thickets at the very head where the river brawled into the loch with a sullen surrender of its mountain independence.

About seven or eight o'clock we got safely over a ford and into the hilly country that lies tumbled to the north of Glencoe. Before us lay the choice of two routes, either of them leading in the direction of Glenurchy, but both of them hemmed in by the most inevitable risks, especially as but one of all our party was familiar (and that one but middling well) with the countryside. "The choice of a cross-road at night in a foreign land is Tall John's pick of the farmer's daughters,"

as our homely proverb has it; you never know what you have till the morn's morning. And our picking was bad indeed, for instead of taking what we learned again was a drove-road through to Tynree, we stood more to the right and plunged into what after all turned out to be nothing better than a corrie among the hills. It brought us up a most steep hillside, and landed us two hours' walk later far too much in the heart and midst of Glencoe to be for our comfort. From the hillside we emerged upon, the valley lay revealed, a great hack among the mountains.

CHAPTER XXIII.--THE WIDOW OF GLENCOE.

Of the seven of us, Stewart was the only one with a notion of the lie of the country. He had bought cattle in the glen, and he had borrowed (as we may be putting it) in the same place, and a man with the gifts of observation and memory, who has had to guess his way at night among foreign clans and hills with a drove of unwilling and mourning cattle before him, has many a feature of the neighbourhood stamped upon his mind. Stewart's idea was that to-night we might cross Glencoe, dive into one of the pa.s.ses that run between the mountains called the Big and Little Herdsman, or between the Little Herd and Ben Fhada, into the foot of the forest of Dalness, then by the corries through the Black Mount of Bredalbane to Glen-urchy. Once on the Brig of Urchy, we were as safe, in a manner, as on the sh.o.r.es of Loch Finne. On Neill Bane's map this looks a very simple journey, that a vigorous mountaineer could accomplish without fatigue in a couple of days if he knew the drove-roads; but it was a wicked season for such an enterprise, and if the Dame Dubh's tale was right (as well enough it might be, for the news of Argile's fall would be round the world in a rumour of wind), every clan among these valleys and hills would be on the hunting-road to cut down broken men seeking their way back to the country of MacCailein Mor. Above all was it a hard task for men who had been starving on a half-meal drammock for two or three days. I myself felt the hunger gnawing at my inside like a restless red-hot conscience. My muscles were like iron, and with a footman's feeding, I could have walked to Inneraora without more than two or three hours' sleep at a time; but my weakness for food was so great that the prospect before me was appalling.

It appalled, indeed, the whole of us. Fancy us on barren hills, unable to venture into the hamlets or townships where we had brought torch and pike a few days before; unable to borrow or to buy, hazarding no step of the foot without a look first to this side and then to yon, lest enemies should be up against us. Is it a wonder that very soon we had the slouch of the gangrel and the cunning aspect of the thief? But there's something in gentle blood that always comes out on such an occasion. The baron-bailie and Neil Campbell, and even the minister, made no ado about their hunger, though they were suffering keenly from it; only the two tacksmen kept up a ceaseless grumbling.

M'Iver kept a hunter's ear and eye alert at every step of our progress.

He had a hope that the white hares, whose footprints sometimes showed among the snow, might run, as I have seen them do at night, within reach of a cudgel; he kept a constant search for badger-hamlets, for he would have dug from his sleep that gluttonous fat-haunched rascal who gorges himself in his own yellow moon-time of harvest. But hare nor badger fell in our way.

The moon was up, but a veil of grey cloud overspread the heavens and a frosty haze obscured the country. A clear cold hint at an odour of spring was already in the air, perhaps the first rumour the bush gets that the sap must rise. Out of the haze now and then, as we descended to the valley, there would come the peculiar cry of the red-deer, or the flaff of a wing, or the bleat of a goat It was maddening to be in the neighbourhood of the meal that roe, or bird, or goat would offer, and yet be unable to reach it.

Thus we were stumbling on, very weary, very hungry, the man with the want in a constant wail, and Sonachan lamenting for suppers he had been saucy over in days of rowth and plenty, when a light oozed out of the grey-dark ahead of us, in the last place in the world one would look for any such sign of humanity.

We stopped on the moment, and John Splendid went ahead to see what lay in the way. He was gone but a little when he came back with a hearty accent to tell us that luck for once was ours.

"There's a house yonder," said he, talking English for the benefit of the cleric; "it has a roaring fire and every sign of comfort, and it's my belief there's no one at home within but a woman and a few bairns.

The odd thing is that as I get a look of the woman between the door-post and the wall, she sits with her back to the cruisie-light, patching clothes and crooning away at a dirge that's broken by her tears. If it had been last week, and our little adventures in Glencoe had brought us so far up this side of the glen, I might have thought she had suffered something at our hands. But we were never near this tack-house before, so the housewife's sorrow, whatever it is, can scarcely be at our door.

Anyway," he went on, "here are seven cold men, and weary men and hungry men too (and that's the worst of it), and I'm going to have supper and a seat, if it's the last in the world."

"I hope there's going to be no robbery about the affair," said the minister, in an apparent dread of rough theft and maybe worse.