John Splendid: The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn

by Neil Munro

  CHAPTER VII.--CHILDREN OF THE MIST.

  The Highlanders of Lochaber, as the old saying goes, "pay theirdaughters' tochers by the light of the Michaelmas moon." Then it wasthat they were wont to come over our seven hills and seven waters tohelp themselves to our cattle when the same were at their fattest andbest It would be a skurry of bare knees down pass and brae, a ring ofthe robbers round the herd sheltering on the bieldy side of the hill orin the hollows among the ripe grass, a brisk change of shot and blow ifalarm rose, and then hie! over the moor by Macfarlane's lantern.

  This Michaelmas my father put up a _buaile-mhart_, a square fold ofwattle and whinstone, into which the herdsmen drove the lowing beastsat the mouth of every evening, and took turn about in watching themthroughout the clear season. It was perhaps hardly needed, for indeedthe men of Lochaber and Glenfalloch and the other dishonest regionsaround us were too busy dipping their hands in the dirty work ofMontrose and his Irish major-general to have any time for their usualautumn's recreation. But a _buaile-mhart_ when shifted from time to timein a field is a profitable device in agriculture, and custom had madethe existence of it almost a necessity to the sound slumber of ourglens. There was a pleasant habit, too, of neighbours gathering at nightabout a fire within one of the spaces of the fold and telling talesand singing songs. Our whole West Country is full of the most wonderfulstories one might seek in vain for among the world of books andscholars--of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, andsea-maiden. The most unlikely looking peasant that ever put his foot toa _caschrom_, the most uncouth hunter that ever paunched a deer, wouldtell of such histories in the most scrupulous language and with cunningregard for figure of speech. I know that nowadays, among people ofesteemed cultivation in the low country and elsewhere, such adiversion might be thought a waste of time, such narratives a sign ofsuperstition. Of that I am not so certain. The practice, if it didno more, gave wings to our most sombre hours, and put a point on theimagination. As for the superstition of the tales of _ceilidh_ and_buaile-mhart_ I have little to say. Perhaps the dullest among usscarce credited the giant and dwarf; but the Little Folks are yet on ourtopmost hills.

  A doctor laughed at me once for an experience of my own at the Piper'sKnowe, on which any man, with a couchant ear close to the grass, mayhear fairy tunes piped in the under-world.

  "A trick of the senses," said he.

  "But I can bring you scores who have heard it!" said I.

  "So they said of every miracle since time began," said he; "it butproves the widespread folly and credulity of human nature."

  I protested I could bring him to the very spot or whistle him the verytunes; but he was busy, and wondered so sedate a man as myself couldcherish so strange a delusion.

  Our fold on Elrigmore was in the centre of a flat meadowland that liesabove Dhu Loch, where the river winds among rush and willow-tree, aconstant whisperer of love and the distant hills and the salt inevitablesea. There we would be lying under moon and star, and beside us thecattle deeply breathing all night long. To the simple tale of old, tothe humble song, these circumstances gave a weight and dignity they mayhave wanted elsewhere. Never a teller of tale, or a singer of song soartless in that hour and mood of nature, but he hung us breathless onhis every accent: we were lone inhabitants of a little space in amagic glen, and the great world outside the flicker of our fire hummeduntenanted and empty through the jealous night.

  It happened on a night of nights--as the saying goes--that thus wewere gathered in the rushy flat of Elrigmore and our hearts easy as toreivers--for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?--whena hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the lastdays of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckledwith sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling inthe east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air.

  We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had setproverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was theyoung morning when through the long grass to the fold came a band ofstrangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission mightbe, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch.

  The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of themcame forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they couldlook in and see the watchers gathered round the fire.

  "Co tha'n sud's an uchd air a bhuaile?" ("Who is there leaning on thefold?") asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands.

  He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastlyeerie in their silence on the wall.

  "Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m'inthaidh aig an fhear as gilebroilleach agaibh" ("My arrow's for the whitest breast, if ye make noanswer "), said my man, and there was no answer.

  The string twanged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the whitebreast fell--shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clanthey name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when werushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field.

  They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, butnamely now through the west for their depredations when the absence oftheir men in battles threw them upon their own resource.

  And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grievedat slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay passing, with theblood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran eachother in their hurry from her foul lips.

  "Dogs! dogs!--heaven's worst ill on ye, dogs!" she cried, a waefulspectacle, and she spat on us as we carried her beside the fire to tryand staunch her wound. She had a fierce knife at her waist and wouldhave used it had she the chance, but we removed it from her reach, andshe poured a fresher, fuller stream of malediction.

  Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it wasthen--with the sweat on her brow--she gave the hint I speak of, the hintof the war's end and the end of MacCailein Mor.

  "Wry-mouths, wry-mouths!" said she; "I see the heather above the myrtleon Lhinne-side, and MacCailein's head on a post."

  That was all.

  It is a story you will find in no books, and yet a story that has beentold sometime or other by every fireside of the shire--not before theprophecy was fulfilled but after, when we were loosed from our bondedword. For there and then we took oath on steel to tell no one of thewoman's saying till the fulness of time should justify or disgrace thesame.

  Though I took oath on this melancholy business like the rest, there wasone occasion, but a day or two after, that I almost broke my pledgedword, and that to the lady who disturbed my Sunday worship and gave meso much reflection on the hunting-road. Her father, as I have said, cameup often on a Saturday and supped his curds-and-cream and grew cheeryover a Dutch bottle with my father, and one day, as luck had it, Bettyhonoured our poor doorstep. She came so far, perhaps, because our menand women were at work on the field I mention, whose second crop ofgrass they were airing for the winter byres--a custom brought to theglen from foreign parts, and with much to recommend it.

  I had such a trepidation at her presence that I had almost fled on somepoor excuse to the hill; but the Provost, who perhaps had made sundrycalls in the bye-going at houses farther down the glen, and was in amellow humour, jerked a finger over his shoulder towards the girl as shestood hesitating in the hall after a few words with my father and me,and said, "I've brought you a good harvester here, Colin, and she'llgive you a day's darg for a kiss."

  I stammered a stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on sowarm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity.

  Mistress Betty coloured and bit her lip.

  "Look at the hussy!" said her father again, laughing with heavingshoulders. "'Where shall we go to-day on our rounds?' said I; 'Where butto Elrigmore,' said she; 'I have not seen Colin for an age!' Yet I'llwarrant you thought the cunning jade shy of a gentleman soldier! Ah,those kirtles, those kirtles! I'll give you a word of wisdom, sir, younev
er learned in Glascow Hie Street nor in the army."

  I looked helplessly after the girl, who had fled, incontinent, to thewomen at work in the field.

  "Well, sir," I said, "I shall be pleased to hear it. If it has anypertinence to the harvesting of a second crop it would be welcome."

  My father sighed. He never entered very heartily into diversionnowadays--small wonder!--so the Provost laughed on with his counsel.

  "You know very well it has nothing to do with harvesting nor harrowing,"he cried; "I said kirtles, didn't I! And you needn't be so coy about thematter; surely to God you never learned modesty at your trade of sackingtowns. Many a wench----"

  "About this counsel," I put in; "I have no trick or tale of wenchcraftbeyond the most innocent. And beside, sir, I think we were just talkingof a lady who is your daughter."

  Even in his glass he was the gentleman, for he saw the suggestion atonce.

  "Of course, of course, Colin," he said hurriedly, coughing in aconfusion. "Never mind an old fool's havering." Then said he again,"There's a boy at many an old man's heart. I saw you standing there andmy daughter was yonder, and it just came over me like the verse of asong that I was like you when I courted her mother. My sorrow! it looksbut yesterday, and yet here's an old done man! Folks have been born andmarried (some of them) and died since syne, and I've been going throughlife with my eyes shut to my own antiquity. It came on me like a flashthree minutes ago, that this gross oldster, sitting of a Saturdaysipping the good _aqua_ of Elrigmore, with a pendulous waistcoat and awrinkled hand, is not the lad whose youth and courtship you put me inmind of."

  "Stretch your hand, Provost, and fill your glass," said my father. Hewas not merry in his later years, but he had a hospitable heart.

  The two of them sat dumb a space, heedless of the bottle or me, and atlast, to mar their manifest sad reflections, I brought the Provost backto the topic of his counsel.

  "You had a word of advice," I said, very softly. There was a small tingeof pleasure in my guess that what he had to say might have reference tohis daughter.

  "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, whenI first sought her company, was my daughter's very model, in face andfigure."

  "She was a handsome woman, Provost," said my father. "I can well believeit," said I. "She is that to-day," cried the Provost, pursing his lipsand lifting up his chin in a challenge. "And I learned one thing at thecourting 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 womanwill put up with blandly in every man but the one man she has a notionof, and that's the absence of conceit about himself or her." In thefield by the river, the harvesters sat at a mid-day meal, contentedlyeating their bannock and cheese. They were young folks all, at the agewhen toil and plain living but give a zest to the errant pleasures oflife, so they filled their hour of leisure with gallivanting among themown and gathered grass. And oh! _mo chridhe_, but that was long ago!Let no one, remembering the charm of an autumn field in his youth, testits cheerfulness when he has got up in years. For he will find it lyingunder a sun less genial than then; he will fret at some influence lost;the hedges tall and beautiful will have turned to stunted boundariesupon his fancy; he will ache at the heart at the memory of those oldcareless crops and reapers when he sits, a poor man or wealthy, amongthe stubble of grass and youth.

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

  "You are short of reapers, I think, by the look of them," she said; "Imiss 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 arethe fields, good crops, food and happiness for all, why must men befighting?"

  "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; merrylads we know--waging savage battle for something I never had the wit todiscover 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 whenthey 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 theheather above the myrtle and MacCailein's head on a post "Did you hearof the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?"

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

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

  "God ward all evil!" cried Betty in a passion of earnestness. "You'll beglad 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 hisluck 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 abalance left of a noble army?"

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

  In spite of the Macaulay prophecy, MacCailein and his men came home inthe fulness of time. They came with the first snowstorm of winter,the clan in companies down Glenaora and his lordship roundabout by theLowlands, 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 cheerfulprospect--too briefly ours--that the country would settle anon to peace.