The Spell of Scotland Part 15

Ruskin married in Perth, one of its fairest maids, who lived on the slope of Kinnoul Hill; and then, unmarrying, the fair lady, looking very fair in the painted pictures, married a painter who once was very much about Perth.

Perth is also the "Muirton" of "The Bonnie Brier Bush." So some have found these environs bonny.

In truth it is a lovely surrounding country. And have you not from childhood, if you read "Macbeth" as early as did Justice Charles E.

Hughes, thought Birnam and Dunsinane the loveliest names in the world?

Six miles up the Tay through bonny country, stands Dunsinnan Hill; not so lovely as our Dunsinane; once it was Dunscenanyse! But Shakespeare always gave words their magic retouching. And once there stood here the castle of Dunsinane where a certain Lady walked in her sleep, and then slept. And below, you see Birnam wood--

"Till great Birnam wood Do come to Dunsinane."

To see that wood wave in the wind is fairly eerie!

Dunkeld is less of a city, more of a memory, exquisite in its beauty, lodged in a close fold of the Highlands. And you reach it through the station, cis-Tay, called Birnam!

It is a quiet peaceful place, more like a now quiet Border town. Hither to this cathedral, the precious remains of Saint Columba were brought by the MacAlpine. So I suppose they still rest here, that wandering dust, that missionary zeal. Also, inharmony, here rest (?) the remains of the Wolf of Badenoch, wicked son of Robert II, and--I am certain the pun has been ventured before--bad enough. Gavin Dougla.s.s of the Vergilian measure was bishop here, and Mrs. Oliphant has written stories round about.

"Cam ye by Athole, lad wi' the philabeg?"

We are getting into the Highlands, we are at them, from now on nothing but philabegs, pibrochs, pipes, tartans and heather, nothing but the distilled essence of heather--heather ale? the secret was lost when the Picts were conquered.

CHAPTER VII

HIGHLAND AND LOWLAND

Many ways lead out of Perth, but best of these is the foot-path way, picked up anywhere in the Highlands. By rail the road leads down to the sea, past Glamis Castle, built in 1500, where the room is shown in which Duncan was murdered in 1000, although Shakespeare says it was at Inverness; and to Kirriemuir, if one would match the "Bonnie Brier Bush"

with "The Window in Thrums." Or by rail the road leads to the lakes of the West, and to the Highlands of the North.

For one short s.p.a.ce I took it northward to the Pa.s.s of Killiecrankie, almost in fear, as a regiment of English mercenaries is said to have been a-feared in the Forty Five, three-quarters of a century after Killiecrankie. For here in a last splendid moment, Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount of Dundee, and sometime Bonnie Dundee, was killed, the battle having gone gloriously his way, for the glorious cause of Stewart and _mon droit_--some say by a silver bullet, the devil having charmed the leaden bullets that were showered against his magic life; those who say it are Whigs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GLAMIS CASTLE.]

Always called Bonnie Dundee by those of us who care for romance. To quote from Samuel Crothers, "And you say they are the same? I cannot make them seem the same. To me there are two of them: Graham of Claverhouse, whom I hate, and the Bonnie Dundee, whom I love. If it's all the same to you, I think I shall keep them separate, and go on loving and hating as aforetime."

The Pa.s.s is lovely enough, on a summer morning, with the sun shining fair on the Highlands, the blue hills misty in the distance, the trees thick green on both sides the bending Garry, and not a living thing in view, nothing which belongs to the Duke of Atholl who owns everything hereabout, except the air and the beauty and the memory, which I packed in my Pilgrim's Wallet.

Because the Duke owns the cathedral I did not claim any memory beside the dust of Bonnie Dundee--

"Fling open the Westport and let me gae free."

And now, to a certain defeat which I suffered near the Pa.s.s of Killiecrankie, when I "cam by Athole." I was without a philabeg. If I had had it--it sounds so enhearteningly like usquebaugh--I think my courage would have been great enough to do the thing I had crossed over seas to do--to walk from Blair Athole through Glen Tilt and between the great lift of the Cairngorms, to Braemar. I had felt that I owed it to Scottish ancestors and to those who had lost in the Risings.

I remembered that Queen Mary had longed to be a man. When she had come into this North to punish Huntley, so the Scottish calendar states, "She repenteth of nothing, but when the lords and others came in the morning from the watch, that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and a knapschall (helmet), a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword." Her father's errant soul was hers. And once she ventured it, but in fear of her life, when she fled from the wraith of Darnley, to the scandalizing of the mongers, "Her Majestie, in mennis claithes, b.u.t.t.i.t and spurrit, departed that samin nicht of Borthwick to Dunbar, quhairof no man knew saif my Lord Duke and sum of his servants, wha met Her Majestie a myll off Borthwick and conveyed her hieness to Dunbar."

[Ill.u.s.tration: GLEN TILT.]

I added another Scottish defeat. For it was excessively warm that summer, and Scotland can be as warm and as dry as Kansas. It is thirty miles, the mountain way. There is no inn. There is possibility--there is danger--of losing the way. There are no wolves, I suppose, and certainly no Wolf of Badenoch. But there were the unknown terrors.

So we walked a certain stent into Glen Tilt, enough to know that it is wild, gloomy, one of the strangest wildest places, Ben-y-Gloe, the "Mountain of the Mist," rising out of the early morning mist, yet not so mysteriously or majestically as the Mountain Going to the Sun. But no valley in our Mountain West has ever seemed more empty. And I suppose since Pictish time this glen has been deserted. There were deer, red deer, that thought they were free, and who looked out of their coverts indifferently. We had not the heart to tell them that they belonged, body and soul, to the Duke of Atholl. After the Porteous riots, Queen Caroline, presiding in the place of George who was absent in his favourite Hanover, threatened "to turn Scotland into a hunting field."

The Duke of Argyle thereupon hinted that he would have to "return to look after my hounds." Queen Caroline seems sovereign to-day. And especially on August eleventh, the day before St. Grouse Day, there is an ominous quiet.

So we returned by way of Coupar Angus--meekly remembering the proverb, "he that maun to Coupar, maun to Coupar." Here we changed cars, nearly losing the train, because we were so engrossed in watching the loading of the luggage, the Scotch porter cheering on his a.s.sistant, "we're twa strong men, haud awa, let's be canny." And in the great gold sunset that was like the glory of G.o.d upon the heavenly Highlands.

We came to Blairgowrie, where we heard in the twilight on the hills above the town a bird of magic such as I have never heard elsewhere. Was it a nightingale, or a night lark? It sang like these.

Next morning we took coach across these great hills, by way of Glenshee, a very lovely way of going, and not to be regretted, in its dashing splendour of a coach and six--except that it was not a thirty-mile walk.

But it is to be historically remembered, because it is the way Mar's men came down to the Strath of Tay, and brought the Rising into the Lowlands. We would go to meet them.

It was a memorable day. Not even the Simplon pa.s.s taken on a June day when the road ran between fresh coach-out-topping walls of glittering snow can make one forget the road over the Spittal of Glenshee. There were impossibly purple mountains, indigo-deep, deeper purple than any hills I have ever seen, so does the ripened heather dye the distances more deeply. There were rocky glens, great loneliness, a mansion here and there only just on leaving Blairgowrie, Tullyveolan, of course; scarce a cottage even on the roadside; once a flock of sheep, near the Spittal, being worked by Scotch collies, with an uncanny, or, canny, second sense to get the master's direction. There was lunch at the Spittal, a one-time Hospice, like that on the Simplon. And I wondered if the song ran of this lovely little glen set in the midst of so much primeval world--

"O wharawa got ye that auld crookit penny, For ane o' bright gowd wad ye niffer wi' me?

Richt fou are baith ends o' my green silken wallet, And braw will your hame be in bonnie Glenshee.

"For a' the bricht gowd in your green silken wallet I never wad niffer my crookit bawbee."

The road at the top of the world runs smoothly enough. But when the Devil's elbow is reached, a tremendous and dangerous turn in the road, every one dismounts from the coach, and the sight of an adventurous motor car coming down the turn does not decrease one's sense of peril.

_Braemar_

And then the sight of Braemar, and a consciousness that if you are about to spend more money at the Fife Arms or the Invercauld than any but royalty has a right to spend--royalty not having earned it--the adventure has been worth it.

And to have forgotten but as the coach flashes by to read the tablet--

"Here Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the summer of 1881, and wrote 'Treasure Island.'"

this is to be home again.

Of course our first pilgrimage was to the Invercauld Arms, where we again set up the standard on the braes of Mar. It was here that Malcolm Canmore inst.i.tuted the Highland Gathering which persists to this day.

And here, under cover of the hunt, so did the loyal Jacobites conceal their intention, the Rising of the Fifteen was planned--and the hunters became the hunted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INVERCAULD HOUSE.]

It was evening, it was the Highlands, the great circle of mountains lay round about. And if King James VIII and III had been defeated these two hundred years, and dead a lesser time, and our loyalty had always been to the Prince who came rather to establish his father than himself, the Fifteen seemed like yesterday. In this remote high corner of the world anything is possible, even the oblivion of time. It seemed very vital, that faraway moment, which in truth few persons to-day take into reckoning; even history recks little of it. But very near in this illusory twilight--was that the Fiery Cross that glimmered in the darkness?

"The standard on the braes o' Mar Is up and streaming rarely; The gathering pipe on Lochnagar Is sounding loud and clearly.

The Highlandmen frae hill and glen, In martial hue, wi' bonnets blue, Wi' belted plaids and burnished blades, Are coming late and early.

"Wha' wadna join our n.o.ble chief, The Drummond and Glengarry?

Macgregor, Murray, Rollo, Keith, Panmure and gallant Harry, Macdonald's men, Clanra.n.a.ld's men, Mackenzie's men, Macgilvrary's men, Strathallan's men, the Lowland men Of Callander and Airlie."

Next day we met a gentleman we forever call "The Advocate of Aberdeen."

In any event the lawyers of Aberdeen have styled themselves "Advocates"

since so addressed by King James. We did not know that when we named him, but we preferred it to any Sandy or "Mac" he might legally carry.

Having been informed by him that our name was Lowland and we were ent.i.tled to none of the thrills of the Highlands, we failed to mount farther than the third stage of the Morrone Hill. The wind blew a gale from the nor'nor'west, like those better known to us from the sou'sou'west. It was humiliating to have the Advocate of Aberdeen instruct us when we returned that if we had gone on we might have proved our Highland blood.