John Splendid Part 9

"A challenge to your eyes, madam," retorted Splendid again, in a raillery wonderful considering his anxiety, and he whispered in my ear--"or to us to war."

As he spoke, the report of a big gun boomed through the frosty air from Dunchuach to the plain, and the beacon flashed up, tall, flaunting, and unmistakable.

John Splendid turned into the hall and raised his voice a little, to say with no evidence of disturbance--

"There's something amiss up the glens, your ladys.h.i.+p."

The harp her ladys.h.i.+p strummed idly on at the moment had stopped on a ludicrous and unfinished note, the hum of conversation ended abruptly.

Up to the window the company crowded, and they could see the balefire blazing hotly against the cool light of the moon and the widely sprinkled stars. Behind them in a little came Argile, one arm only thrust hurriedly in a velvet jacket, his hair in a disorder, the pallor of study on his cheek. He very gently pressed to the front, and looked out with a lowering brow at the signal.

"Ay, ay!" he said in the English, after a pause that kept the room more intent on his face than on the balefire. "My old luck bides with me.

I thought the weather guaranteed me a season's rest, but here's the claymore again! Alasdair, Craignish, Sir Donald, I wish you gentlemen would set the summons about with as little delay as need be. We have no time for any display of militant science, but as these beacons carry their tale fast we may easily be at the head of Glen Aora before the enemy is down Glenurchy."

Sir Donald, who was the eldest of the officers his lords.h.i.+p addressed, promised a muster of five hundred men in three hours' time. "I can have a _crois-tara_," he said, "at the very head of Glen s.h.i.+ra in an hour."

"You may save yourself the trouble," said John Splendid; "Glen s.h.i.+ra's awake by this time, for the watchers have been in the hut on Ben Bhuidhe since ever we came back from Lorn, and they are in league with other watchers at the Gearron town, who will have the alarm miles up the Glen by now if I make no mistake about the breed."

By this time a servant came in to say Sithean Sluaidhe hill on Cowal was ablaze, and likewise the hill of Ardno above the Ardkinglas lands.

"The alarm will be over Argile in two hours," said his lords.h.i.+p. "We're grand at the beginnings of things," and as he spoke he was pouring, with a steady hand, a gla.s.s of wine for a woman in the tremors. "I wish to G.o.d we were better at the endings," he added, bitterly. "If these Athole and Antrim caterans have the secret of our pa.s.ses, we may be rats in a trap before the morn's morning."

The hall emptied quickly, a commotion of folks departing rose in the courtyard, and candle and torch moved about. Horses put over the bridge at a gallop, striking sparks from the cobble-stones, swords jingled on stirrups. In the town, a piper's tune hurriedly lifted, and numerous lights danced to the windows of the burghers. John Splendid, the Marquis, and I were the only ones left in the hall, and the Marquis turned to me with a smile--

"You see your pledge calls for redemption sooner than you expected, Elrigmore. The enemy's not far from Ben Bhuidhe now, and your sword is mine by the contract."

"Your lords.h.i.+p can count on me to the last ditch," I cried; and indeed I might well be ready, for was not the menace of war as muckle against my own hearth as against his?

"Our plan," he went on, "as agreed upon at a council after my return from the north, was to hold all above Inneraora in simple defence while lowland troops took the invader behind. Montrose or the Mac Donalds can't get through our pa.s.ses."

"I'm not c.o.c.k-sure of that, MacCailein," said Splendid. "We're here in the bottom of an ashet; there's more than one deserter from your tartan on the outside of it, and once they get on the rim they have, by all rules strategic, the upper hand of us in some degree. I never had much faith (if I dare make so free) in the surety of our retreat here. It's an old notion of our grandads that we could bar the pa.s.ses."

"So we can, sir, so we can!" said the Marquis, nervously picking at his b.u.t.tons with his long white fingers, the nails vexatiously polished and shaped.

"Against horse and artillery, I allow, surely not against Gaelic foot.

This is not a wee foray of broken men, but an attack by an army of numbers. The science of war--what little I learned of it in the Low Countries with gentlemen esteemed my betters--convinces me that if a big enough horde fall on from the rim of our ashet, as I call it, they might sweep us into the loch like rattons."

I doubt MacCailein Mor heard little of this uncheery criticism, for he was looking in a seeming blank abstraction out of the end window at the town lights increasing in number as the minutes pa.s.sed. His own piper in the close behind the b.u.t.tery had tuned up and into the gathering--

"Bha mi air banais 'am bail' Inneraora. Banais bu mhiosa bha riamh air an t-saoghal!"

I felt the tune stir me to the core, and M'Iver, I could see by the twitch of his face, kindled to the old call.

"Curse them!" cried MacCailein; "Curse them!" he cried in the Gaelic, and he shook a white fist foolishly at the north; "I'm wanting but peace and my books. I keep my ambition in leash, and still and on they must be snapping like curs at Argile. G.o.d's name! and I'll crush them like ants on the ant-heap."

From the door at the end of the room, as he stormed, a little bairn toddled in, wearing a night-s.h.i.+rt, a curly gold-haired boy with his cheeks like the apple for hue, the sleep he had risen from still heavy on his eyes. Seemingly the commotion had brought him from his bed, and up he now ran, and his little arms went round his father's knees. On my word I've seldom seen a man more vastly moved than was Archibald, Marquis of Argile. He swallowed his spittle as if it were wool, and took the child to his arms awkwardly, like one who has none of the handling of his own till they are grown up, and I could see the tear at the cheek he laid against the youth's ruddy hair.

"Wild men coming!" said the child, not much put about after all.

"They shan't touch my little Illeasbuig," whispered his lords.h.i.+p, kissing him on the mouth. Then he lifted his head and looked hard at John Splendid. "I think," he said, "if I went post-haste to Edinburgh, I could be of some service in advising the nature and route of the hara.s.sing on the rear of Montrose. Or do you think--do you think----?"

He ended in a hesitancy, flus.h.i.+ng a little at the brow, his lips weakening at the corner.

John Splendid, at my side, gave me with his knee the least nudge on the leg next him.

"Did your lords.h.i.+p think of going to Edinburgh at once?" he asked, with an odd tone in his voice, and keeping his eyes very fixedly on a window.

"If it was judicious, the sooner the better," said the Marquis, nuzzling his face in the soft warmth of the child's neck.

Splendid looked helpless for a bit, and then took up the policy that I learned later to expect from him in every similar case. He seemed to read (in truth it was easy enough!) what was in his master's mind, and he said, almost with gaiety--

"The best thing you could do, my lord. Beyond your personal encouragement (and a Chiefs aye a consoling influence on the field, I'll never deny), there's little you could do here that cannot, with your pardon, be fairly well done by Sir Donald and myself, and Elrigmore here, who have made what you might call a trade of tulzie and brulzie."

MacCailein Mor looked uneasy for all this open a.s.surance. He set the child down with an awkward kiss, to be taken away by a servant la.s.s who had come after him.

"Would it not look a little odd!" he said, eyeing us keenly.

"Your lords.h.i.+p might be sending a trusty message to Edinburgh," I said; and John Splendid with a "Pshaw!" walked to the window, saying what he had to say with his back to the candle-light.

"There's not a man out there but would botch the whole business if you sent him," he said; "it must be his lords.h.i.+p or n.o.body. And what's to hinder her ladys.h.i.+p and the children going too? Snugger they'd be by far in Stirling Lodge than here, I'll warrant. If I were not an old runt of a bachelor, it would be my first thought to give my women and bairns safety."

MacCailein flew at the notion. "Just so, just so," he cried, and of a sudden he skipped out of the room.

John Splendid turned, pushed the door to after the n.o.bleman, and in a soft voice broke into the most terrible torrent of bad language ever I heard (and I've known cavaliers of fortune free that way). He called his Marquis everything but a man.

"Then why in the name of G.o.d do you urge him on to a course that a fool could read the poltroonery of? I never gave MacCailein Mor credit for being a coward before," said I.

"Coward!" cried Splendid. "It's no cowardice but selfishness--the disease, more or less, of us all. Do you think yon gentleman a coward?

Then you do not know the man. I saw him once, empty-handed, in the forest, face the white stag and beat it off a hunter it was goring to death, and they say he never blenched when the bonnet was shot off his head at Drimtyne, but jested with a 'Close on't: a nail-breadth more, and Colin was heir to an earlhood!'"

"I'm sorry to think the worst of an Argile and a Campbell, but surely his place is here now."

"It is, I admit; and I egged him to follow his inclination because I'm a fool in one thing, as you'll discover anon, because ifs easier and pleasanter to convince a man to do what he wants to do than to convince him the way he would avoid is the only right one."

"It's not an altogether nice quirk of the character," I said, drily. It gave me something of a stroke to find so weak a bit in a man of so many notable parts.

He s.p.u.n.ked up like tinder.

"Do you call me a liar?" he said, with a face as white as a clout, his nostrils stretching in his rage.

"Liar!" said I, "not I. It would be an ill time to do it with our common enemy at the door. A lie (as I take it in my own Highland fas.h.i.+on) is the untruth told for cowardice or to get a mean advantage of another: your way with MacCailein was but a foolish way (also Highland, I've noticed) of saving yourself the trouble of spurring up your manhood to put him in the right."

"You do me less than half justice," said Splendid, the blood coming back to his face, and him smiling again; "I allow I'm no preacher. If a man must to h.e.l.l, he must, his own gait. The only way I can get into argument with him about the business is to fly in a fury. If I let my temper up I would call MacCailein coward to his teeth, though I know it's not his character. But I've been in a temper with my cousin before now, and I ken the stuff he's made of: he gets as cold as steel the hotter I get, and with the poorest of causes he could then put me in a black confusion----"

"But you----"

"Stop, stop! let me finish my tale. Do you know, I put a fair face on the black business to save the man his own self-respect. He'll know himself his going looks bad without my telling him, and I would at least leave him the notion that we were blind to his weakness. After all it's not much of a weakness--the wish to save a wife and children from danger. Another bookish disease, I admit: their over-much study has deadened the man to a sense of the becoming, and in an affair demanding courage he acts like a woman, thinking of his household when he should be thinking of his clan. My only consolation is that after all (except for the look of the thing) his leaving us matters little."

I thought different on that point, and I proved right. If it takes short time to send a fiery cross about, it takes shorter yet to send a naughty rumour, and the story that MacCailein Mor and his folks were off in a hurry to the Lowlands was round the greater part of Argile before the clansmen mustered at Inneraora. They never mustered at all, indeed, for the chieftains of the small companies that came from Glen Finne and down the country no sooner heard that the Marquis was off than they took the road back, and so Montrose and Colkitto MacDonald found a poltroon and deserted countryside waiting them.