by Neil Munro
CHAPTER V.--KIRK LAW.
Of course Clan MacNicoll was brought to book for this frolic onInneraora fair-day, banned by Kirk, and soundly beaten by the Doomsterin name of law. To read some books I've read, one would think our Gaelsin the time I speak of, and even now, were pagan and savage. We are not,I admit it, fashioned on the prim style of London dandies and Italianfops; we are--the poorest of us--coarse a little at the hide, too quick,perhaps, to slash out with knife or hatchet, and over-ready to carrythe most innocent argument the dire length of a thrust with the sword.That's the blood; it's the common understanding among ourselves. But wewere never such thieves and marauders, caterans bloody and unashamed, asthe Galloway kerns and the Northmen, and in all my time we had plenty todo to fend our straths against reivers and cattle-drovers from the badclans round about us. We lift no cattle in all Campbell country. WhenI was a lad some of the old-fashioned tenants in Glenaora once or twicewent over to Glen Nant and Rannoch and borrowed a few beasts; but theEarl (as he was then) gave them warning for it that any vassal of hisfound guilty of such practice again should hang at the town-head asreadily as he would hang a Cowal man for theftuously awaytaking a boardof kipper salmon. My father (peace with him!) never could see the logicof it "It's no theft," he would urge, "but war on the parish scale: itneeds coolness of the head, some valour, and great genius to take fiftyor maybe a hundred head of bestial hot-hoof over hill and moor. I wouldnever blame a man for lifting a mart of black cattle any more than forkilling a deer: are not both the natural animals of these mountains,prey lawful to the first lad who can tether or paunch them?"
"Not in the fold, father!" I mind of remonstrating once.
"In the fold too," he said. "Who respects Bredal-bane's fenced deer? Notthe most Christian elders in Glenurchy: they say grace over venison thatcrossed a high dyke in the dead of night tail first, or game birds thattumbled out of their dream on the bough into the reek of a brimstonefire. A man might as well claim the fish of the sea and the switch ofthe wood, and refuse the rest of the world a herring or a block of wood,as put black cattle in a fank and complain because he had to keep watchon them!"
It was odd law, but I must admit my father made the practice run withthe precept, for more than once he refused to take back cattle lifted bythe Macgregors from us, because they had got over his march-stone.
But so far from permitting this latitude in the parish of Inneraora,Kirk and State frowned it down, and sins far less heinous. The sessionwas bitterly keen on Sabbath-breakers, and to start on a Saturday nighta kiln-drying of oats that would claim a peat or two on Sabbath, wasaccounted immorality of the most gross kind.
Much of this strict form, it is to be owned, was imported by the Lowlandburghers, and set up by the Lowland session of the English kirk, ofwhich his lordship was an elder, and the Highlanders took to it badlyfor many a day. They were aye, for a time, driving their cattle throughthe town on the Lord's day or stravaiging about the roads and woods, ordrinking and listening to pipers piping in the change-houses at time ofsermon, fond, as all our people are by nature, of the hearty open air,and the smell of woods, and lusty sounds like the swing of the seas andpipers playing old tunes. Out would come elders and deacons to scour thestreets and change-houses for them, driving them, as if with scourges,into worship. Gaelic sermon (or Irish sermon, as the Scots calledit) was but every second Sabbath, and on the blank days the landwardHighlanders found in town bound to go to English sermon whether theyknew the language or not, a form which it would be difficult nowadays todefend. And it was, in a way, laughable to see the big Gaels driven tochapel like boys by the smug light burghers they could have crushedwith a hand. But time told; there was sown in the landward mind by theblessing of God (and some fear of the Marquis, no doubt) a respectfor Christian ordinance, and by the time I write of there were no moredevout churchgoers and respecters of the law ecclesiastic than theumquhile pagan small-clans of Loch Firme and the Glens.
It is true that Nicol Beg threatened the church-officer with his dirkwhen he came to cite him before the session a few days after the splorein Inneraora, but he stood his trial like a good Christian all the same,he and half a score of his clan, as many as the church court could getthe names of. I was a witness against them, much against my will, withJohn Splendid, the Provost, and other townsfolk.
Some other defaulters were dealt with before the Mac-Nicolls, a fewthroughither women and lads from the back-lanes of the burghs, on theold tale, a shoreside man for houghing a quey, and a girl Mac Vicar,who had been for a season on a visit to some Catholic relatives in theIsles, and was charged with malignancy and profanity.
Poor lass! I was wae for her. She stood bravely beside her father, whoseface was as begrutten as hers was serene, and those who put her throughher catechism found to my mind but a good heart and tolerance where theysought treachery and rank heresy. They convicted her notwithstanding.
"You have stood your trials badly, Jean MacVicar," said Master Gordon."A backslider and malignant proven! You may fancy your open professionof piety, your honesty and charity, make dykes to the narrow way. A fonddelusion, woman! There are, sorrow on it! many lax people of your kindin Scotland this day, hangers-on at the petticoat tails of the whore ofBabylon, sitting like you, as honest worshippers at the tables of theLord, eating Christian elements that but for His mercy choked them atthe thrapple. You are a wicked woman!"
"She's a good daughter," broke in the father through his tears; but hisGaelic 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 atboth English and Gaelic kirks before the congregations, thereafter to beexcommunicate and banished furth and from this parish of Inneraora andGlenaora."
The girl never winced.
Her father cried again. "She can't leave me," said he, and he looked tothe Marquis, who all the time sat on the hard deal forms, like a plainman. "Your lordship kens she is motherless and my only kin; that's shetrue and honest."
The Marquis said yea nor nay, but had a minute's talk with theclergyman, as I thought at the time, to make him modify his ruling. ButMaster Gordon enforced the finding of the session.
"Go she must," said he; "we cannot have our young people poisoned at themind."
"Then she'll bide with me," said the father, angrily.
"You dare not, as a Christian professor, keep an excommunicate in yourhouse," said Gordon; "but taking to consideration that excommunicationprecludes not any company of natural relations, we ordain you never tokeep her in your house in this parish any more; but if you have a mindto 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 nowthat his lordship, ever a restraining influence on his clans, was boundfor new wars elsewhere, a firmer hand was wanted on the people he leftbehind, and Master Gordon pressed for stricter canons. Notification wasmade discharging the people of the burgh from holding lyke-wakes inthe smaller houses, from unnecessary travel on the Sabbath, from publicflyting and abusing, and from harbouring ne'er-do-weels from otherparishes; and seeing it had become a practice of the women attendingkirk to keep their plaids upon their heads and faces in time of sermonas occasion of sleeping, as also that they who slept could not bedistinguished from those who slept not, that they might be wakened, itwas ordained that such be not allowed hereafter, under pain of takingthe 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 thegrammar-school, agreed to pay the fees of divers poor scholars,instructed the administering of the funds in the poor's-box, fixed alevy on the town for the following week to help the poorer wives whowould be left by their fencible husbands, and paid ten marks to anelderly widow woman who desired, like a good Gael, to have her burialclothes ready, but had
not the wherewithal for linen.
"We are," said Master Gordon, sharpening a pen in a pause ere theMacNicolls came forward, "the fathers and guardians of this parishpeople high and low. Too long has Loch Finne side been ruled childishly.I have no complaint about its civil rule--his lordship here might wellbe trusted to that; but its religion was a thing of rags. They tell meold Campbell in the Gaelic end of the church (peace with him!) usedto come to the pulpit with a broadsword belted below his Geneva gown.Savagery, savagery, rank and stinking! I'll say it to his face inanother world, and a poor evangel and ensample truly for the quarrelsomelandward folk of this parish, that even now, in the more unctuous timesof God's grace, doff steel weapons so reluctantly. I found a man with adirk at his hip sitting before the Lord's table last Lammas!"
"Please God," said the Marquis, "the world shall come to its sightsome 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 awonderful love for nature that's raw and human, and this session-mademorality 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 allhis sleek coat Man! I hate the very look of those Lowland cattle sittinghere making kirk laws for their emperors, and their bad-bred Scotsspeech jars on my ear like an ill-tuned bagpipe."
Master Gordon possibly guessed what was the topic of Splendid'sconfidence,--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 tosermonise, still at the shaping of his pen.
"Your lordship will have the civil chastisement of these MacNicollsafter this session is bye with them. We can but deal with theirspiritual error. Nicol Beg and his relatives are on our kirk rolls asmembers or adherents, and all we can do is to fence the communion-tableagainst 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 Highlandburgh too trifling an affair for the interference of the kirk or thecourt of law: I am under no such delusion. There is a valour better thanthe valour of the beast unreasoning. Your lordship has seen it at itsproper place in your younger wars; young Elrigmore, I am sure, has seenit on the Continent, where men live quiet burgh lives while left alone,and yet comport themselves chivalrously and gallantly on the strickenfields when their country or a cause calls for them so to do. In theheart of man is hell smouldering, always ready to leap out in flames ofsharpened steel; it's a poor philosophy that puffs folly in at the earto stir the ember, saying, 'Hiss, catch him, dog!' I'm for keeping hell(even in a wild High-landman's heart) for its own business of punishingthe wicked."
"Amen to yon!" cried MacCailein, beating his hand on a book-board, andMaster Gordon took a snuff like a man whose doctrine is laid out plainfor the world and who dare dispute it. In came the beadle with theMacNicolls, very much cowed, different men truly from the bravegentlemen who cried blood for blood on Provost Brown's stair.
They had little to deny, and our evidence was but a word ere the sessionpassed sentence of suspension from the kirk tables, as Gordon had said,and a sheriffs officer came to hale them to the Tolbooth for their trialon behalf of the civil law.
With their appearance there my tale has nothing to do; the Doomster, asI have said, had the handling of them with birch. What I have describedof this kirk-session's cognisance of those rough fellows' ill behaviouris designed ingeniously to convey a notion of its strict ceremony andits wide dominion,--to show that even in the heart of Arraghael we werenot beasts in that year when the red flash of the sword came on us andthe persecution of the torch. The MacNicoll's Night in the Hie Street ofMacCailein Mot's town was an adventure uncommon enough to be spoken offor years after, and otherwise (except for the little feuds between theGlens-men and the burghers without tartan), our country-side was as safeas the heart of France--safer even. You might leave your purse on theopen road anywhere within the Crooked Dyke with uncounted gold in it andbe no penny the poorer at the week's end; there was never lock or bar onany door in any of the two glens--locks, indeed, were a contrivance theLowlanders brought for the first time to the town; and the gardens layopen to all who had appetite for kail or berry. There was no man who satdown to dinner (aye in the landward part I speak of; it differed in thetown) without first going to the door to look along the high road tosee if wayfarers were there to share the meal with him and his family."There he goes," was the saying about any one who passed the door atany time without coming in to take a spoon--"there he goes; I'll warranthe's a miser at home to be so much of a churl abroad" The very gipsyclaimed 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 grassy season like the seas, growing such lush crops asthe remoter Highlands never dreamt of. Not a foot of good soil but hadits ploughing, or at least gave food to some useful animal, and yet sorocky the hills between us and lower Lochow, so tremendous steep andinaccessible the peaks and corries north of Ben Bhuidhe, that they wererelegated to the chase. There had the stag his lodging and the huntsmana home almost perpetual. It was cosy, indeed, to see at evening thepeat-smoke from well-governed and comfortable hearths lingering on thequiet air, to go where you would and find bairns toddling on the braesor singing women bent to the peat-creel and the reaping-hook.
In that autumn I think nature gave us her biggest cup brimmingly, and myfather, as he watched his servants binding corn head high, said hehad never seen the like before. In the hazel-woods the nuts bent thebranches, so thick were they, so succulent; the hip and the haw, theblaeberry and the rowan, swelled grossly in a constant sun; the orchardsof the richer folks were in a revelry of fruit Somehow the wintergrudged, as it were, to come. For ordinary, October sees the trees thatbeard Dun-chuach and hang for miles on the side of Creag Dubh searingand falling below the frost; this season the cold stayed aloof long, andfriendly winds roved from the west and south. The forests gleamed in agolden fire that only cooled to darkness when the firs, my proud tallfriends, held up their tasselled heads in unquenching green. Birdsswarmed in the heather, and the sides of the bare hills moved constantlywith deer. Never a stream in all real Argile but boiled with fish; youcame down to Eas-a-chleidh on the Aora with a creel and dipped it intothe linn to bring out salmon rolling with fat.
All this I dwell on for a sensible purpose, though it may seem to bebut an old fellow's boasting and a childish vanity about my owncalf-country. 'Tis the picture I would paint--a land laughing andcontent, well governed by Gillesbeg, though Gruamach he might be by nameand by nature. Fourpence a-day was a labourer's wage, but what need hadone of even fourpence, with his hut free and the food piling richly athis very door?