John Splendid Part 8

"Man! I forget now," he said, rousing himself. "What were we on?"

"Harvesting," said father.

"No, sir; kirtles," said I.

"Kirtles--so it was," said the Provost. "My wife at Betty's age, when I first sought her company, was my daughter's very model, in face and figure."

"She was a handsome woman, Provost," said my father. "I can well believe it," said I. "She is that to-day," cried the Provost, pursing his lips and lifting up his chin in a challenge. "And I learned one thing at the courting of her which is the gist of my word of wisdom to you, Colin.

Keep it in mind till you need it. It's this: There's one thing a woman will put up with blandly in every man but the one man she has a notion of, and that's the absence of conceit about himself or her." In the field by the river, the harvesters sat at a mid-day meal, contentedly eating their bannock and cheese. They were young folks all, at the age when toil and plain living but give a zest to the errant pleasures of life, so they filled their hour of leisure with gallivanting among the mown and gathered gra.s.s. And oh! _mo chridhe_, but that was long ago!

Let no one, remembering the charm of an autumn field in his youth, test its cheerfulness when he has got up in years. For he will find it lying under a sun less genial than then; he will fret at some influence lost; the hedges tall and beautiful will have turned to stunted boundaries upon his fancy; he will ache at the heart at the memory of those old careless crops and reapers when he sits, a poor man or wealthy, among the stubble of gra.s.s and youth.

As I lay on the shady side of an alder bank watching our folk at their gambols, I found a serenity that again set me at my ease with the Provost's daughter. I gathered even the calmness to invite her to sit beside me, and she made no demur.

"You are short of reapers, I think, by the look of them," she said; "I miss some of the men who were here last year."

They were gone with MacCailein, I explained, as paid volunteers.

"Oh! those wars!" she cried sadly. "I wish they were ended. Here are the fields, good crops, food and happiness for all, why must men be fighting?"

"Ask your Highland heart," said I. "We are children of strife."

"In my heart," she replied, "there's but love for all. I toss sleepless, at night, thinking of the people we know--the good, kind, gallant; merry lads we know--waging savage battle for something I never had the wit to discover the meaning of."

"The Almighty's order--we have been at it from the birth of time."

"So old a world might have learned," she said, "to break that order when they break so many others. Is his lordship likely to be back soon?"

"I wish he might be," said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the heather above the myrtle and MacCailein's head on a post "Did you hear of the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?"

"Yes," she said; "an ugly business! What has that to do with MacCailein's home-coming?"

"Very little indeed," I answered, recalling our bond; "but she cursed his lordship and his army with a zeal that was alarming, even to an old soldier of Sweden."

"G.o.d ward all evil!" cried Betty in a pa.s.sion of earnestness. "You'll be glad to see your friend M'Iver back, I make no doubt."

"Oh! he's an old hand at war, madam; he'll come safe out of this by his luck and skill, if he left the army behind him."

"I'm glad to hear it," said she, smiling.

"What!" I cried in raillery; "would you be grateful for so poor a balance left of a n.o.ble army?"

And she reddened and smiled again, and a servant cried us in to the dinner-table.

In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home in the fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter, the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by the Lowlands, where he had a mission to the Estates. The war, for the time, was over, a truce of a kind was patched up, and there was a cheerful prospect--too briefly ours--that the country would settle anon to peace.

CHAPTER VIII.--THE BALE-FIRES ON THE BENS.

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 sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, crisped and curdled into ice on the surface in the s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.sive 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 carca.s.s that at morning he could not flap a wing, and fell a ready victim to a knock from my staff.

The pa.s.ses 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 superst.i.tions, 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 circ.u.mstance 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 n.o.blest 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 gla.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls 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.