John Splendid Part 6

"She's a good daughter," broke in the father through his tears; but his Gaelic never stopped the minister.

"An ignorant besom."

"She's leech-wife to half Kenmore," protested the old man.

"And this court censures you, ordains you to make public confession at both English and Gaelic kirks before the congregations, thereafter to be excommunicate and banished furth and from this parish of Inneraora and Glenaora."

The girl never winced.

Her father cried again. "She can't leave me," said he, and he looked to the Marquis, who all the time sat on the hard deal forms, like a plain man. "Your lordship kens she is motherless and my only kin; that's she true and honest."

The Marquis said yea nor nay, but had a minute's talk with the clergyman, as I thought at the time, to make him modify his ruling. But Master Gordon enforced the finding of the session.

"Go she must," said he; "we cannot have our young people poisoned at the mind."

"Then she'll bide with me," said the father, angrily.

"You dare not, as a Christian professor, keep an excommunicate in your house," said Gordon; "but taking to consideration that excommunication precludes not any company of natural relations, we ordain you never to keep her in your house in this parish any more; but if you have a mind to do so with her, to follow her wherever she goes."

And that sorry small family went out at the door, in tears.

Some curious trials followed, and the making of quaint bylaws; for now that his lordship, ever a restraining influence on his clans, was bound for new wars elsewhere, a firmer hand was wanted on the people he left behind, and Master Gordon pressed for stricter canons. Notification was made discharging the people of the burgh from holding lyke-wakes in the smaller houses, from unnecessary travel on the Sabbath, from public flyting and abusing, and from harbouring ne'er-do-weels from other parishes; and seeing it had become a practice of the women attending kirk to keep their plaids upon their heads and faces in time of sermon as occasion of sleeping, as also that they who slept could not be distinguished from those who slept not, that they might be wakened, it was ordained that such be not allowed hereafter, under pain of taking the plaids from them.

With these enactments too came evidence of the Kirk's paternity.

It settled the salary (200 pounds Scots) of a new master for the grammar-school, agreed to pay the fees of divers poor scholars, instructed the administering of the funds in the poor's-box, fixed a levy on the town for the following week to help the poorer wives who would be left by their fencible husbands, and paid ten marks to an elderly widow woman who desired, like a good Gael, to have her burial clothes ready, but had not the wherewithal for linen.

"We are," said Master Gordon, sharpening a pen in a pause ere the MacNicolls came forward, "the fathers and guardians of this parish people high and low. Too long has Loch Finne side been ruled childishly.

I have no complaint about its civil rule--his lordship here might well be trusted to that; but its religion was a thing of rags. They tell me old Campbell in the Gaelic end of the church (peace with him!) used to come to the pulpit with a broadsword belted below his Geneva gown.

Savagery, savagery, rank and stinking! I'll say it to his face in another world, and a poor evangel and ensample truly for the quarrelsome landward folk of this parish, that even now, in the more unctuous times of G.o.d's grace, doff steel weapons so reluctantly. I found a man with a dirk at his hip sitting before the Lord's table last Lammas!"

"Please G.o.d," said the Marquis, "the world shall come to its sight some day. My people are of an unruly race, I ken, good at the heart, hospitable, valorous, even with some Latin chivalry; but, my sorrow!

they are sorely unamenable to policies of order and peace."

"Deil the hair vexed am I," said John Splendid in my ear; "I have a wonderful love for nature that's raw and human, and this session-made morality is but a gloss. They'll be taking the tartan off us next maybe!

Some day the old dog at the heart of the Highlands will bark for all his sleek coat Man! I hate the very look of those Lowland cattle sitting here making kirk laws for their emperors, and their bad-bred Scots speech jars on my ear like an ill-tuned bagpipe."

Master Gordon possibly guessed what was the topic of Splendid's confidence,--in truth, few but knew my hero's mind on these matters; and I have little doubt it was for John's edification he went on to sermonise, still at the shaping of his pen.

"Your lordship will have the civil chastis.e.m.e.nt of these MacNicolls after this session is bye with them. We can but deal with their spiritual error. Nicol Beg and his relatives are on our kirk rolls as members or adherents, and all we can do is to fence the communion-table against them for a period, and bring them to the stool of repentance.

Some here may think a night of squabbling and broken heads in a Highland burgh too trifling an affair for the interference of the kirk or the court of law: I am under no such delusion. There is a valour better than the valour of the beast unreasoning. Your lordship has seen it at its proper place in your younger wars; young Elrigmore, I am sure, has seen it on the Continent, where men live quiet burgh lives while left alone, and yet comport themselves chivalrously and gallantly on the stricken fields when their country or a cause calls for them so to do. In the heart of man is h.e.l.l smouldering, always ready to leap out in flames of sharpened steel; it's a poor philosophy that puffs folly in at the ear to stir the ember, saying, 'Hiss, catch him, dog!' I'm for keeping h.e.l.l (even in a wild High-landman's heart) for its own business of punishing the wicked."

"Amen to yon!" cried MacCailein, beating his hand on a book-board, and Master Gordon took a snuff like a man whose doctrine is laid out plain for the world and who dare dispute it. In came the beadle with the MacNicolls, very much cowed, different men truly from the brave gentlemen who cried blood for blood on Provost Brown's stair.

They had little to deny, and our evidence was but a word ere the session pa.s.sed sentence of suspension from the kirk tables, as Gordon had said, and a sheriffs officer came to hale them to the Tolbooth for their trial on behalf of the civil law.

With their appearance there my tale has nothing to do; the Doomster, as I have said, had the handling of them with birch. What I have described of this kirk-session's cognisance of those rough fellows' ill behaviour is designed ingeniously to convey a notion of its strict ceremony and its wide dominion,--to show that even in the heart of Arraghael we were not beasts in that year when the red flash of the sword came on us and the persecution of the torch. The MacNicoll's Night in the Hie Street of MacCailein Mot's town was an adventure uncommon enough to be spoken of for years after, and otherwise (except for the little feuds between the Glens-men and the burghers without tartan), our country-side was as safe as the heart of France--safer even. You might leave your purse on the open road anywhere within the Crooked d.y.k.e with uncounted gold in it and be no penny the poorer at the week's end; there was never lock or bar on any door in any of the two glens--locks, indeed, were a contrivance the Lowlanders brought for the first time to the town; and the gardens lay open to all who had appet.i.te for kail or berry. There was no man who sat down to dinner (aye in the landward part I speak of; it differed in the town) without first going to the door to look along the high road to see if wayfarers were there to share the meal with him and his family.

"There he goes," was the saying about any one who pa.s.sed the door at any time without coming in to take a spoon--"there he goes; I'll warrant he's a miser at home to be so much of a churl abroad" The very gipsy claimed the cleanest bed in a Glenman's house whenever he came that way, and his gossip paid handsomely for his shelter.

It was a fine fat land this of ours, mile upon mile thick with herds, rolling in the gra.s.sy season like the seas, growing such lush crops as the remoter Highlands never dreamt of. Not a foot of good soil but had its ploughing, or at least gave food to some useful animal, and yet so rocky the hills between us and lower Lochow, so tremendous steep and inaccessible the peaks and corries north of Ben Bhuidhe, that they were relegated to the chase. There had the stag his lodging and the huntsman a home almost perpetual. It was cosy, indeed, to see at evening the peat-smoke from well-governed and comfortable hearths lingering on the quiet air, to go where you would and find bairns toddling on the braes or singing women bent to the peat-creel and the reaping-hook.

In that autumn I think nature gave us her biggest cup br.i.m.m.i.n.gly, and my father, as he watched his servants binding corn head high, said he had never seen the like before. In the hazel-woods the nuts bent the branches, so thick were they, so succulent; the hip and the haw, the blaeberry and the rowan, swelled grossly in a constant sun; the orchards of the richer folks were in a revelry of fruit Somehow the winter grudged, as it were, to come. For ordinary, October sees the trees that beard Dun-chuach and hang for miles on the side of Creag Dubh searing and falling below the frost; this season the cold stayed aloof long, and friendly winds roved from the west and south. The forests gleamed in a golden fire that only cooled to darkness when the firs, my proud tall friends, held up their ta.s.selled heads in unquenching green. Birds swarmed in the heather, and the sides of the bare hills moved constantly with deer. Never a stream in all real Argile but boiled with fish; you came down to Eas-a-chleidh on the Aora with a creel and dipped it into the linn to bring out salmon rolling with fat.

All this I dwell on for a sensible purpose, though it may seem to be but an old fellow's boasting and a childish vanity about my own calf-country. 'Tis the picture I would paint--a land laughing and content, well governed by Gillesbeg, though Gruamach he might be by name and by nature. Fourpence a-day was a labourer's wage, but what need had one of even fourpence, with his hut free and the food piling richly at his very door?

CHAPTER VI.--MY LADY OF MOODS.

On the 27th of July in this same year 1644 we saw his lordship and his clan march from Inneraora to the dreary north. By all accounts (brought in to the Marquis by foot-runners from the frontier of Lorn), the Irishry of Colkitto numbered no more than 1200, badly armed with old matchlocks and hampered by two or three dozen camp-women bearing the bairns of this dirty regiment at their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Add to this as many Highlanders under Montrose and his cousin Para Dubh of Inchbrackie, and there was but a force of 3500 men for the good government of Argile to face. But what were they? If the Irish were poorly set up in weapons the Gaels were worse. On the spring before, Gillesbeg had harried Athole, and was cunning enough to leave its armouries as bare as the fields he burned, so now its clans had but home-made claymores, bows, and arrows, Lochaber _tuaghs_ and cudgels, with no heavy pieces. The cavalry of this unholy gang was but three garrons, string and bone. Worse than their ill-arming, as any soldier of experience will allow, were the jealousies between the two bodies of the scratched-up army. Did ever one see a Gael that nestled to an Irishman? Here's one who will swear it impossible, though it is said the blood is the same in both races, and we nowadays read the same Gaelic Bible. Colkitto MacDonald was Gael by birth and young breeding, but Erinach by career, and repugnant to the most malignant of the west clans before they got to learn, as they did later, his quality as a leader. He bore down on Athole, he and his towsy rabble, hoping to get the clans there to join him greedily for the sake of the old feud against MacCailein Mor, but the Stewarts would have nothing to say to him, and blows were not far off when Montrose and his cousin Black Pate came on the scene with his king's licence.

To meet this array now playing havoc on the edge of Campbell country, rumour said two armies were moving from the north and east: if Argile knew of them he kept his own counsel on the point, but he gave colour to the tale by moving from Inneraora with no more than 2000 foot and a troop of horse. These regimentals had mustered three days previously, camping on the usual camping-ground at the Maltland, where I spent the last day and night with them. They were, for the main part, the Campbells of the shire: of them alone the chief could muster 5000 half-merkland men at a first levy, all capable swordsmen, well drilled and disciplined _soldadoes_, who had, in addition to the usual schooling in arms of every Gael, been taught many of the niceties of new-fashioned war, countermarch, wheeling, and pike-drill. To hear the orders, "Pouldron to pouldron; keep your files; and middlemen come forth!" was like an echo from my old days in Germanie. These manoeuvres they were instructed in by hired veterans of the Munro and Mackay battalions who fought with Adolphus. Four or five companies of Lowland soldiers from Dunbarton and Stirling eked out the strength; much was expected from the latter, for they were, unlike our clansmen, never off the parade-ground, and were in receipt of pay for their militant service; but as events proved, they were MacCailein's poor reed.

I spent, as I have said, a day and a night in the camp between Aora river and the deep wood of Tarradubh. The plain hummed with our little army, where now are but the nettle and the ivied tower, and the yellow bee booming through the solitude; morning and night the shrill of the _piob-mhor_ rang cheerily to the ear of Dun-chuach; the sharp call of the chieftains and sergeants, the tramp of the brogued feet in their simple evolutions, the clatter of arms, the contention and the laughing, the song, the reprimand, the challenge, the jest,--all these were pleasant to me.

One morning I got up from a bed of gall or bog-myrtle I shared with John Splendid after a late game of chess, and fared out on a little eminence looking over the scene. Not a soldier stirred in his plaid; the army was drugged by the heavy fir-winds from the forest behind. The light of the morning flowed up wider and whiter from the Cowal hills, the birds woke to a rain of twittering prayer among the bushes ere ever a man stirred more than from side to side to change his dream. It was the most melancholy hour I ever experienced, and I have seen fields in the wan morning before many a throng and b.l.o.o.d.y day. I felt "fey," as we say at home--a premonition that here was no conquering force, a sorrow for the glens raped of their manhood, and hearths to be desolate. By-and-by the camp moved into life, Dun-barton's drums beat the reveille, the pipers arose, doffed their bonnets to the sun, and played a rouse; my gloom pa.s.sed like a mist from the mountains.

They went north by the Aora pa.s.ses into the country of Bredalbane, and my story need not follow them beyond.

Inneraora burghers went back to their commercial affairs, and I went to Glen Shira to spend calm days on the river and the hill. My father seemed to age perceptibly, reflecting on his companion gone, and he clung to me like the _crotal_ to the stone. Then it was (I think) that some of the sobriety of life first came to me, a more often cogitation and balancing of affairs. I began to see some of the tanglement of nature, and appreciate the solemn mystery of our travel across this vexed and care-warped world. Before, I was full of the wine of youth, giving doubt of nothing a lodgment in my mind, acting ever on the impulse, sucking the lemon, seeds and all, and finding it unco sappy and piquant to the palate. To be face to face day after day with this old man's grief, burdened with his most apparent double love, conscious that I was his singular bond to the world he would otherwise be keen to be leaving, set me to chasten my dalliance with fate. Still and on, our affection and its working on my prentice mind is nothing to dwell on publicly. I've seen bearded men kiss each other in the France, a most scandalous exhibition surely, one at any rate that I never gazed on without some natural Highland shame, and I would as soon kiss my father at high noon on the open street as dwell with paper and ink upon my feeling to him.

We settled down to a few quiet weeks after the troops had gone. Rumours came of skirmishes at Tippermuir and elsewhere. I am aware that the fabulous Wishart makes out that our lads were defeated by Montrose at every turning, claiming even Dundee, Crief, Strathbogie, Methven Wood, Philiphaugh, Inverness, and Dunbeath. Let any one coldly calculate the old rogue's narrative, and it will honestly appear that the winner was more often Argile, though his lordship never followed up his advantage with slaughter and ma.s.sacre as did his foes at Aberdeen. All these doings we heard of but vaguely, for few came back except an odd lad wounded and cut off in the wilds of Athole from the main body.

Constant sentinels watched the land from the fort of Dunchuach, that dominates every pa.s.s into our country, and outer guards took day and night about on the remoter alleys of Aora and Shira Glens. South, east, and west, we had friendly frontiers; only to the north were menace and danger, and from the north came our scaith--the savage north and jealous.

These considerations seemed, on the surface, little to affect Inneraora and its adjacent parts. We slept soundly at night, knowing the warders were alert; the women with absent husbands tempered their anxiety with the philosophy that comes to a race ever bound to defend its own doors.

The common folks had _ceilidhs_ at night--gossip parties in each other's houses, and in our own hall the herds and shepherds often convocat to change stories, the tales of the Fingalians, Ossian and the Firme. The burgh was a great place for suppers too, and never _ceilidh_ nor supper went I to but the daughter of Provost Brown was there before me. She took a dislike to me, I guessed at last, perhaps thinking I appeared too often; and I was never fully convinced of this till I met her once with some companions walking in the garden of the castle, that always stood open for the world.

I was pa.s.sing up the Dame's Pad, as it was called, a little turfed road, overhung by walnut trees brought by the old Earl from England. I had on a Lowland costume with a velvet coat and buckled shoes, and one or two vanities a young fellow would naturally be set up about, and the consciousness of my trim clothing put me in a very complacent mood as I stopped and spoke with the damsels.

They were pretty girls all, and I remember particularly that Betty had a spray of bog-myrtle and heather fastened at a brooch at her neck.

She was the only one who received me coldly, seemed indeed impatient to be off, leaving the conversation to her friends while she toyed with a few late flowers on the bushes beside her.

"You should never put heather and gall together," I said to her, rallyingly.

"Indeed!" she said, flushing. "Here's one who wears what she chooses, regardless of custom or freit."

"But you know," I said, "the badge of the Campbell goes badly with that of so bitter a foe as the MacDonald. You might as well add the oak-stalk of Montrose, and make the emblem tell the story of those troubles."

It was meant in good-humour, but for some reason it seemed to sting her to the quick. I could see it in the flash of her eyes and the renewed flush at her temples.

There was a little mischievous girl in the company, who giggled and said, "Betty's in a bad key to-day; her sweetheart has vexed her surely."

It was a trivial remark, but I went off with it in my mind.

A strange interest in the moods of this old school-friend had begun to stir me. Meeting her on my daily walks to town by the back way through the new avenue, I found her seemingly anxious to avoid me, and difficult to warm to any interest but in the most remote and abstract affairs.