John Splendid Part 30

I did it with some repugnance, let me own; but I, too, shook her hand, and followed the minister out at the door. M'Iver was hot with annoyance and shame, and ready to find fault with us for what we had done; but the cleric carded him like wool in his feelings.

"Oh, valour, valour!" he said in the midst of his sermon, "did I not say you knew your duty in hate better than in affection?"

John Splendid kept a dour-set jaw, said never a word, and the seven of us proceeded on our way.

It was well on in the morning, the land sounding with a new key of troubled and loosening waters. Mists clogged the mountain-tops, and Glencoe far off to its westward streamed with a dun vapour p.r.i.c.ked with the tip of fir and ash. A moist feel was in the air; it relapsed anon to a smirr of rain.

"This is a shade better than clear airs and frost and level snow for quarries on a hunting," said I.

"I'm glad it suits you," said M'Iver. "I've seen the like before, and I'm not so sure about the advantage of it."

CHAPTER XXIV.--A NIGHT'S SHELTER.

The rain that was a smirr or drizzle on the north side of Glencoe grew to a steady shower in the valley itself, and when we had traversed a bit in the airt of Tynree it had become a pouring torrent--slanting in our faces with the lash of whips, streaming from the hair and crinkling the hands, and leaving the bonnet on the head as heavy as any French soldier's salade. I am no great unlover of a storm in the right circ.u.mstances. There is a long strath between Nordlingen and Donauworth of Bavaria, where once we amazed our foreign allies by setting out, bare to the kilt and sark, in thres.h.i.+ng hail, running for miles in the pelt of it out of the sheer content of encounter--and perhaps a flagon or two of wine. It was a bravado, perhaps, but a ploy to brace the spirit; we gathered from it some of the virtues of our simple but ample elders, who were strong men when they lay asleep with a cheek to the naked earth and held their faces frankly up to sun or rain. But if we rejoiced in the rains of Bavaria, there was no cause for glee in those torrents of Glencoe, for they made our pa.s.sage through the country more difficult and more dangerous than it was before. The snow on the ground was for hours a slushy compost, that the foot slipped on at every step, or that filled the brogue with a paste that nipped like brine. And when the melting snow ran to lower levels, the soil itself, relaxing the rigour of its frost, became as soft as b.u.t.ter and as unstable to the foot The b.u.ms filled to the lip and brawled over, new waters sprung up among the rocks and ran across our path, so that we were for ever wading and slipping and splas.h.i.+ng and stumbling on a route that seemed never to come to any end or betterment.

Seven more pitiful men never trod Highlands. The first smirr soaked our clothing; by the middle of the glen we were drenched to the hide, and the rain was flowing from the edges of our kilts in runnels. Thus heaven scourged us with waters till about the hour of noon, when she alternated water with wind and gales burst from the west, the profound gorges of Stob Dubh belching full to the throat with animus. There were fir-plantings by the way, whose branches tw.a.n.ged and boomed in those terrific blasts, that on the bare brae-side lifted up the snow with an invisible scoop and flung it in our faces.

Stewart and the man with the want led the way, the latter ever with his eyes red a-weeping, looking about him with starts and tremors, moaning lamentably at every wail of wind, but pausing, now and then, to gnaw a bone he had had enough of a thief s wit to pouch in the house of the blind widow. Stewart, a lean wiry man, covered the way with a shepherd's long stride-heel and toe and the last spring from the knee-most poverty-struck and mean in a kilt that flapped too low on his leg and was frayed to ribbons, a man with but one wish in the world, to save his own unworthy skin, even if every one else of our distressed corps found a sodden and abominable death in the swamps or rocks of that doleful valley. Then on the rear behind those commoners came the minister and John Splendid and myself, the minister with his breeks burst at the knees, his stockings caught up with a poor show of trimncss by a braid of rushes, contrived by M'Iver, and his coat-skirts streaming behind him. You could not but respect the man's courage: many a soldier I've seen on the dour hard leagues of Germanie--good soldiers too, heart and body---collapse under hards.h.i.+ps less severe. Gordon, with a drawn and curd-white face, and eyes burning like lamps, surrendered his body to his spirit, and it bore him as in a dream through wind and water, over moor and rock, and amid the woods that now and again we had to hide in.

That we had to hide so little was one of the miracles of our traverse.

At any other time perhaps Glencoe and the regions round about it would be as well tenanted as any low-country strath, for it abounded on either hand with towns.h.i.+ps, with crofts that perched on brief plateaux, here and there with black bothy-houses such as are (they say) the common dwellings over all the Hebrid Isles. Yet, moving, not in the ultimate hollow of the valley, but in fighting fas.h.i.+on upon the upper levels, we were out of the way of molestation, and in any case it was a valley for the time deserted of men. Women we could see in plenty, drawing water or bearing peats in from the bogs behind their dwellings, or crossing from house to house or toun to toun, with plaids drawn tightly over their heads, their bodies bent to meet the blasts that made their clothing banner and full. Nor children either were there in that most barren country, or they kept within, sheltering the storms a.s.sailing, and the want of them (for I have ever loved the little ones) added twenty-fold to my abhorrence of the place.

We had to hide but rarely, I say: two or three times when down in the valley's depths there showed a small group of men who were going in the same direction as ourselves by the more natural route, at a quarter of a league's distance in advance of us. They were moving with more speed than we, and for a time we had the notion that they might be survivors, like ourselves, of Argile's clan. But at last this fancy was set at flight by the openness of their march, as well as by their stoppage at several houses by the way, from which they seemed to be joined by other men, who swelled their numbers so that after a time there would be over a score of them on the mission, whatever it might be. In that misty rain-swept day the eye could not carry far, and no doubt they were plainer to our view than we were to theirs among the drab vapours of the hillside. But once or twice we thought they perceived us, for they stopped and looked to the left and up the brae-face we were on, and then it was we had to seek the shelter of tree or bush. If they saw us, they seemed to suspect no evil, for they held on their way, still ahead of us, and making for Tynree. Whoever they were, they became at last so manifest a danger to our escape out of the head of the glen that we fell back anew on the first plan of going through the corries on the south side of the glen and piercing by them to Dalness. In the obscurity of a great shower that set up a screen between us and the company marching to Tynree, we darted down the brae, across the valley, and over to the pa.s.sage they call the Lairig Eilde, that is on the west of the great Little Herd hill of Etive, and between it and Ben Fhada or the Long Mount, whose peaks you will find with snow in their gullies in the height of summer.

It was with almost a jocund heart I turned my back on Glencoe as we took a drove-path up from the river. But I glanced with a s.h.i.+ver down its terrible distance upon that nightmare of gulf and eminence, of gash, and peaks afloat upon swirling mists. It lay, a looming terror, forgotten of heaven and unfriendly to man (as one might readily imagine), haunted for ever with wailing airs and rumours, ghosts calling in the deeps of dusk and melancholy, legends of horror and remorse.

"Thank G.o.d," said I, as we gave the last look at it--"thank G.o.d I was not born and bred yonder. Those hills would crush my heart against my very ribs."

"It's good enough for the people who are in it," said John. "What are they but MacDonalds? 'Take and not give' is their motto. They can have Glencoe for me, with M'Millan's right to Knapdale,--as long as wave beats on rock."

Master Gordon, though we had spoken in the Gaelic, half guessed our meaning. "A black place and mournful," said he; "but there may be love there too and warm hearts, and soil where the truth might flourish as in the champaign over against Gilgal beside the plains of Moreh."

Now we were in a tract of country mournful beyond my poor description.

I know comes in Argile that whisper silken to the winds with juicy gra.s.ses, corries where the deer love to prance deep in the cool dew, and the beasts of far-off woods come in bands at their seasons and together rejoice. I have seen the hunter in them and the shepherd too, coa.r.s.e men in life and occupation, come sudden among the blowing rush and whispering reed, among the bog-flower and the cannoch, unheeding the moor-hen and the cailzie-c.o.c.k rising, or the stag of ten at pause, while they stood, pa.s.sionate adventurers in a rapture of the mind, held as it were by the spirit of such places as they lay in a s...o...b..rry bloom of haze, the spirit of old good songs, the baffling surmise of the piper and the bard. To those corries of my native place will be coming in the yellow moon of brock and foumart--the beasts that dote on the autumn eves--the People of Quietness; have I not seen their lanthoms and heard their laughter in the night?--so that they must be blessed corries, so endowed since the days when the G.o.ds dwelt in them without tartan and spear in the years of the peace that had no beginning.

But the corries of Lorn; black night on them, and the rain rot!

They were swamps of despair as we went struggling through them. The knife-keen rushes whipped us at the thigh, the waters bubbled in our shoes. Round us rose the hills grey and bald, sown with boulders and crowned with sour mists. Surely in them the sun never peeps even in the long days of summer: the star, I'll warrant, never rains on them his calm influence!

Dolour left us speechless as we trudged, even when for a time we were lost We essayed in a silence at openings here and there, at hacks and water-currents, wandering off from each other, whistling and calling, peering from rock-brows or spying into wounds upon the hills, so that when we reached Dalness it was well on in the day. If in summer weather the night crawls slowly on the Highlands, the winter brings a fast black rider indeed. His hoofs were drumming on the hills when first we saw sight of Dalness; he was over and beyond us when we reached the plain.

The land of Lorn was black dark to the very roots of its trees, and the rivers and burns themselves got lost in the thick of it, and went through the night calling from hollow to hollow to hearten each other till the dawn.

Dalness lies in Glen Etive, at a gusset of hills on either side of which lie paths known to the drover and the adventurer. The house receded from the pa.s.ses and lay back in a plcasance walled by whin or granite, having a wattled gate at the entrance. When we were descending the pa.s.s we could see a glare of light come from the place even though the mist shrouded, and by the time we got to the gate h was apparent that the house was lit in every chamber. The windows that pierced the tall gables threw beams of light into the darkness, and the open door poured out a yellow flood. At the time we came on it first we were unaware of our propinquity to it, and this mansion looming on us suddenly through the vapours teemed a cantrip of witchcraft, a dwelling's ghost, grey, eerie, full of frights, a phantom of the mind rather than a habitable home. We paused in a dumb astonishment to look at it lying there in the darkness, a thing so different from the barren hills and black bothies behind us.

We gathered in a cl.u.s.ter near the wattle gate, the minister perhaps the only man who had the wit to acknowledge the reality of the vision.

His eyes fairly gloated on this evidence of civilised state, so much recalling the surroundings in which he was most at home. As by an instinct of decency, he drew up his slack hose and bound them anew with the rushen garters, and pulled his coat-lapels straight upon his chest, and set his dripping peruke upon his head with a touch of the dandy's air, all the time with his eyes on those gleaming windows, as if he feared to relinquish the spectacle a moment, lest it should fly like a dream.

We had thought first of pus.h.i.+ng across the glen, over the river, through Corrie Ghuibhasan, and into the Black Mount; but the journey in a night like what was now fallen was not to be attempted. On the hills beyond the river the dog-fox barked with constancy, his vixen screeching like a child--signs of storm that no one dare gainsay. So we determined to seek shelter and concealment somewhere in the policies of the house. But first of all we had to find what the occasion was of this brilliancy in Dalness, and if too many people for our safety were not in the neighbourhood. I was sent forward to spy the place, while my companions lay waiting below a cl.u.s.ter of alders.

I went into the grounds with my heart very high up on my bosom, not much put about at any human danger, let me add, for an encounter with an enemy of flesh and blood was a less fearsome prospect than the chance of an encounter with more invulnerable foes, who, my skin told me, haunted every heugh and howe of that still and sombre demesne of Dalness. But I set my teeth tight in my resolution, and with my dirk drawn in my hand--it was the only weapon left me--I crept over the gra.s.s from bush to bush and tree to tree as much out of the revelation of the window-lights as their numbers would let me.

There was not a sound in the place, and yet those lights might have betokened a great festivity, with pipe and harp going, and dancers' feet thudding on the floor.

At one of the gables there was a low window, and I made for it, thinking it a possible eye to a lobby or pa.s.sage, and therefore not so hazardous to look in at I crept up and viewed the interior.

My window, to my astonishment, looked in on no bare plain lobby, but on a s.p.a.cious salmanger or hall, very rosy with sconce-light and wood-fire--a hall that extended the whole length of the house, with a bye-ordinar high ceil of black oak carved very handsomely. The walls at the far end were hung with tapestry very like MacCailein's rooms at home in Inneraora, and down the long sides, whose windows streamed the light upon the hall, great stag-heads glowered with unsleeping eyes, stags of numerous tines. The floor was strewn with the skins of the chase, and on the centre of it was a table laden with an untouched meal, and bottles that winked back the flicker of the candle and the hearth.

The comfort of the place, by contrast with our situation, seemed, as I looked hungrily on it through the thick gla.s.s of the lozen, more great and tempting than anything ever I saw abroad in the domains of princes.

Its air was charged with peace and order; the little puffs and coils and wisps of silver-grey smoke, coming out of the fireplace into the room, took long to swoon into nothingness in that tranquil interior.

But the most wonderful thing of all was, that though the supper seemed ready waiting for a company, and could not have been long left, I waited five or ten minutes with my face fast to the pane and no living footstep entered the room. I watched the larger door near the far-off end eagerly; it lay ajar, smiling a welcome to the parts of the house beyond, but no one came in.

"Surely they are throng in some other wing," I thought, "and not so hungry as we, or their viands did not lie so long untouched in that dainty room."

I went round the house at its rear, feeling my way slowly among the bushes. I looked upon parlours and bed-closets, kitchens and corridors; they were lighted with the extravagance of a marriage-night, and as tenantless and silent as the cells of Kilchrist The beds were straightened out, the hearths were swept, the floors were scrubbed, on every hand was the evidence of recent business, but the place was relinquished to the ghosts.

How it was I cannot say, but The mystery of the house made me giddy at the head. Yet I was bound to push my searching further, so round with a swithering heart went Elrigmore to the very front door of the mansion of Dalness--open, as I have said, with the light gus.h.i.+ng lemon-yellow on the lawn. I tapped softly, my heart this time even higher than my bosom, with a foot back ready to retreat if answer came. Then I rasped an alarm on the side of the yett with a noise that rang fiercely through the place and brought the sweat to my body, but there was even then no answer.

So in I went, the soft soles of my brogues making no sound on the boards, but leaving the impress of my footsteps in a damp blot.

Now, to me, brought up in a Highland farm-steading (for the house of Elrigmore is without great s.p.a.ciousness or pretence), large and rambling castles and mansions ever seem eerie. I must in them be thinking, like any boy, of the whisperings of wraiths in their remote upper rooms; I feel strange airs come whipping up their long or crooked lobbies at night; the number of their doors are, to my Highland instinct, so many unnecessary entrances for enemies and things mischancy.

But to wander over the house of Dalness, lit from tol-booth to garret with lowe--to see the fires, not green but at their prime with high-banked peat that as yet had not thrown an ash--to see so fine a supper waiting in a mansion utterly desolate and its doors open to the wilds, seemed a thing so magical that I felt like taking my feet from the place in a hurry of hurries and fleeing with my comrades from so unco a countryside. High and low I ranged in the interior. I had found a nut without a kernel, and at last I stood dumfoundered and afraid, struck solemn by the echo of my own hail as it rang unfamiliar through the interior.

I might have been there fifteen minutes or half an hour when M'Iver, impatient at my delay or fearing some injury to my person, came in and joined me. He too was struck with amazement at the desertion of the house.

He measured the candles, he scrutinised the fires, he went round the building out and in and he could but conclude that we must be close upon the gate when the house was abandoned.

"But why abandon it?" I asked.

"That's the Skyeman's puzzle; it would take seven men and seven years to answer it," said he. "I can only say it's very good of them (if there's no ambuscade in it) to leave so fine an inn and so bonny a supper with a bush above the door and never a bar against entrance. We'll just take advantage of what fortune has sent us."

"The sooner the better," said I, standing up to a fire that delighted my body like a caress. "I have a trick of knowing when good fortune's a dream, and i'll be awake and find myself lying on hard heather before the bite's at my mouth."

M'Iver ran out and brought in our companions, none of them unwilling to put this strange free hostel to the test for its warmth and hospitality.

We shut and barred the doors, and set ourselves down to such a cold collation as the most fortunate of us had not tasted since the little wars began. Between the savage and the gentleman is but a good night's lodging. Give the savage a peaceful hearth to sit by, a roof to his head, and a copious well-cooked supper, and his savagery will surrender itself to the sleek content of a Dutch merchantman. We sat at a table whose load would have rationed a company of twice our number, and I could see the hard look of hunting relax in the aspect of us all: the peering, restless, sunken eyes came out of their furrowed caverns, turned calm, full, and satisfied; the lines of the brow and mouth, the contour of the cheek, the carriage of the head, the disposition of the hands, altered and improved. An hour ago, when we were the sport of ferocious nature in the heart of a country infernal, no more than one of us would have swithered to strike a blow at a fellow-creature and to have robbed his corpse of what it might have of food and comfort Now we gloated in the airs benign of Dalness house, very friendly to the world at large, the stuff that tranquil towns are made of. We had even the minister's blessing on our food, for Master Gordon accepted the miracle of the open door and the vacant dwelling with John Splen-did's philosophy, a.s.suring us that in doing so he did no more than he would willingly concede any harmless body of broken men such as we were, even his direst enemies, if extremity like ours brought them to his neighbourhood.

"I confess I am curious to know how the thing happened, but the hand of the Almighty's in it anyway," he said; and so saying he lay back in his chair with a sigh of satisfaction that lost nothing of its zest by the influence of the rain that blattered now in drumming violence on the window-panes.

John Splendid, at the table-end, laughed shortly between his sups at a flagon of wine.

"All the same," said he, "I would advise you to put some of the Almighty's provand in your pouch, for fear the grace that is ours now may be torn suddenly enough from us."

Sonachan pointed at Stewart, who had already filled every part of his garments with broken meat, and his wallet as well. "There's a cautious man," said he, "whatever your notion of sudden ceasing may be. He has been putting bite about in his wallet and his stomach since ever we sat down. Appin ways, no doubt."

"_Biadh an diugh, cogadh a maireach_--food to-day, war to-morrow," said the son of kings. "Royal's my race! A man should aye be laying in as he goes: if I had not had my wallet on Loch Leven-side, I ken some gentry who would have been as hungry as common herds, and with nothing to help it."