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

by Neil Munro

  CHAPTER X.--THE FLIGHT TO THE FOREST.

  We made good speed up the burn-side, through the fields, and into thefinest forest that was (or is to this day, perhaps) in all the wideHighlands. I speak of Creag Dubh, great land of majestic trees, homeof the red-deer, rich with glades carpeted with the juiciest grass, andendowed with a cave or two where we knew we were safe of a sanctuary ifit came to the worst, and the Athole men ran at our heels. It welcomedus from the rumour of battle with a most salving peace. Under the highfir and oak we walked in a still and scented air, aisles lay about anddeep recesses, the wind sang in the tops and in the vistas of the trees,so that it minded one of Catholic kirks frequented otherwhere. We spedup by the quarries and through Eas-a-chosain (that little glen so fullof fondest memorials for all that have loved and wandered), and foundour first resting-place in a cunning little hold on an eminence lookingdown on the road that ran from the town to Coillebhraid mines. Below usthe hillside dipped three or four hundred feet in a sharp slant bushedover with young _darach_ wood; behind us hung a tremendous rock that fewstanding upon would think had a hollow heart Here was our refuge, andthe dry and stoury alleys of the fir-wood we had traversed gave no clueof our track to them that might hunt us.

  We made a fire whose smoke curled out at the back of the cave into alinn at the bottom of a fall the Cromalt burn has here, and had therebeen any to see the reek they would have thought it but the finer sprayof the thawed water rising among the melting ice-lances. We made, too,couches of fir-branches--the springiest and most wholesome of beds inlieu of heather or gall, and laid down our weariness as a soldier wouldrelinquish his knapsack, after John Splendid had bandaged my woundedshoulder.

  In the cave of Eas-a-chosain we lay for more days than I kept countof, I immovable, fevered with my wound, Sir Donald my nurse, and JohnSplendid my provider. They kept keen scrutiny on the road below, wheresometimes they could see the invaders passing in bands in their searchfor scattered townships or crofts.

  On the second night John ventured into the edge of the town to see howfared Inneraora and to seek provand. He found the place like a fierycross,--burned to char at the ends, and only the mid of it--the solidTolbooth and the gentle houses--left to hint its ancient pregnancy. Acorps of Irish had it in charge while their comrades scoured the rest ofthe country, and in the dusk John had an easy task to find brandy in thecellars of Craig-nure (the invaders never thought of seeking a cellarfor anything more warming than peats), a boll of meal in handfuls hereand there among the meal-girnels of the commoner houses that lay open tothe night, smelling of stale hearth-fires, and harried.

  To get fresh meat was a matter even easier, though our guns we darenot be using, for there were blue hares to snare, and they who have nottaken fingers to a roasted haunch of badger harried out of his hidingwith a club have fine feeding yet to try. The good Gaelic soldier willeat, sweetly, crowdy made in his brogue--how much better off were wewith the stout and well-fired oaten cakes that this Highland gentlemanmade on the flagstone in front of our cave-fire!

  Never had a wounded warrior a more rapid healing than I. "_Ruigidh anro-ghiullach air an ro-ghalar_"--good nursing will overcome the worstdisease, as our antique proverb says, and I had the best of nursing andbut a baggage-master's wound after all. By the second week I was haleand hearty. We were not uncomfortable in our forest sanctuary; we werewell warmed by the perfumed roots of the candle-fir; John Splendid'sforaging was richer than we had on many a campaign, and a pack of carteslent some solace to the heaviest of our hours. To our imprisonmentwe brought even a touch of scholarship. Sir Donald was a student ofEdinburgh College--a Master of Arts--learned in the moral philosophies,and he and I discoursed most gravely of many things that had smallharmony with our situation in that savage foe-haunted countryside.

  To these, our learned discourses, John Splendid would listen withan impatient tolerance, finding in the most shrewd saying of the oldscholars we dealt with but a paraphrase of some Gaelic proverb or theroundabout expression of his own views on life and mankind.

  "Tuts! tuts!" he would cry, "I think the dissensions of you two are butone more proof of the folly of book-learning. Your minds are not yourown, but the patches of other people's bookish duds. A keen eye, acustom of puzzling everything to its cause, a trick of balancing thedifferent motives of the human heart, get John M'Iver as close on thebone when it comes to the bit. Every one of the scholars you are talkingof had but my own chance (maybe less, for who sees more than a Cavalierof fortune?) of witnessing the real true facts of life. Did they liveto-day poor and hardy, biting short at an oaten bannock to make it gothe farther, to-morrow gorging on fat venison and red rich wine? Didthey parley with cunning lawyers, cajole the boor, act the valorous ona misgiving heart, guess at the thought of man or woman oftener thanwe do? Did ever you find two of them agree on the finer points of theirscience? Never the bit!"

  We forgave him his heresies for the sake of their wit, that I but poorlychronicle, and he sang us wonderful Gaelic songs that had all of thatsame wisdom he bragged of--no worse, I'll allow, than the wisdom ofprint; not all love-songs, laments, or such naughty ballads as you willhear to-day, but the poetry of the more cunning bards. Our cavern, inits inner recesses, filled with the low rich chiming of his voice; hisface, and hands, and whole body took part in the music. In those hourshis character borrowed just that touch of sincerity it was in want ofat ordinary times, for he was one of those who need trial and trouble tobring out their better parts.

  We might have been happy, we might have been content, living thus inour cave the old hunter's life; walking out at early mornings in theadjacent parts of the wood for the wherewithal to breakfast; roundingin the day with longer journeys in the moonlight, when the shadows werecrowded with the sounds of night bird and beast;--we might have beenhappy, I say, but for thinking of our country's tribulation. Where wereour friends and neighbours? Who were yet among the living? How faredour kin abroad in Cowal or fled farther south to the Rock of Dunbarton?These restless thoughts came oftener to me than to my companions, andmany an hour I spent in woeful pondering in the alleys of the wood.

  At last it seemed the Irish who held the town were in a sure way todiscover our hiding if we remained any longer there. Their provender wasrunning low, though they had driven hundreds of head of cattle beforethem down the Glens; the weather hardened to frost again, and they werepushing deeper into the wood to seek for bestial. It was full of animalswe dare not shoot, but which they found easy to the bullet; red-deerwith horns--even at three years old--stunted to knobs by a constant lifein the shade and sequestration of the trees they threaded their livesthrough, or dun-bellied fallow-deer unable to face the blasts of theexposed hills, light-coloured yeld hinds and hornless "heaviers" (orwinterers) the size of oxen. A flock or two of wild goat, even, lingeredon the upper slopes towards Ben Bhrec, and they were down now browsingin the ditches beside the Marriage Tree.

  We could see little companies of the enemy come closer and closer onour retreat each day--attracted up the side of the hill from the road bybirds and beast that found cover under the young oaks.

  "We'll have to be moving before long," said Sir Donald, ruefully lookingat them one day--so close at hand that we unwittingly had our fingersround the dirk-hilts.

  He had said the true word.

  It was the very next day that an Irishman, bending under a bush to lifta hedgehog that lay sleeping its winter sleep tightly rolled up in grassand bracken, caught sight of the narrow entrance to our cave. Our eyeswere on him at the time, and when he came closer we fell back intothe rear of our dark retreat, thinking he might not push his inquiryfurther.

  For once John Splendid's cunning forsook him in the most ludicrous way."I could have stabbed him where he stood," he said afterwards, "forI was in the shadow at his elbow;" but he forgot that the fire whoseembers glowed red within the cave would betray its occupation quite aswell as the sight of its occupants, and that we were discovered onlystruck him when the man, after but one glance in, w
ent bounding down thehill to seek for aid in harrying this nest of ours.

  It was "Bundle and Go" on the bagpipes. We hurried to the top of thehill and along the ridge just inside the edge of the pines in thedirection of the Aora, apprehensive that at every step we should fallupon bands of the enemy, and if we did not come upon themselves, we cameupon numerous enough signs of their employment. Little farms lay in theheart of the forest of Creag Dubh,--or rather more on the upper edgeof it,--their fields scalloped into the wood, their hills a part of themountains that divide Loch Finne from Lochow. To-day their roof-treeslay humbled on the hearth, the gable-walls stood black and eerie, withthe wind piping between the stones, the cabars or joists held charredarms to heaven, like poor martyrs seeking mercy. Nothing in or aboutthese once happy homesteads, and the pertinents and pendicles near them,had been spared by the robbers.

  But we had no time for weeping over such things as we sped on our wayalong the hillside for Dunchuach, the fort we knew impregnable and sureto have safety for us if we could get through the cordon that was boundto be round it.

  It was a dull damp afternoon, an interlude in the frost, chilly and rawin the air, the forest filled with the odours of decaying leaves andmoss. The greater part of our way lay below beechwood neither thick normassive, giving no protection from the rain to the soil below it, sothat we walked noisily and uncomfortably in a mash of rotten vegetation.We were the length of the Cherry Park, moving warily, before our firstcheck came. Here, if possible, it were better we should leave the woodand cut across the mouth of the Glen to Dunchuach on the other side. Butthere was no cover to speak of in that case. The river Aora, ploppingand crying on its hurried way down, had to be crossed, if at all, by awooden bridge, cut at the parapets in the most humorous and useless wayin embrasures, every embrasure flanked by port-holes for musketry--alaughable pretence about an edifice in itself no stronger against powderthan a child's toy.

  On the very lowest edges of the wood, in the shade of a thick plumpof beech, strewed generously about the foot by old bushes of whinand bramble, we lay at last studying the open country before us,and wondering how we should win across it to the friendly shelter ofDunchuach. Smoke was rising from every chimney in the castle, which,with its moat and guns, and its secret underground passage to theseashore, was safe against surprises or attacks through all thisdisastrous Antrim occupation. But an entrance to the castle wasbeyond us; there was nothing for it but Dunchuach, and it cheered uswonderfully too, that from the fort there floated a little stream ofdomestic reek, white-blue against the leaden grey of the unsettled sky.

  "Here we are, dears, and yonder would we be," said John, diggingherb-roots with his knife and chewing them in an abstraction of hunger,for we had been disturbed at a meal just begun to.

  I could see a man here and there between us and the lime-kiln we mustpass on our way up Dunchuach. I confessed myself in as black a quandaryas ever man experienced. As for Sir Donald--good old soul!--he was now,as always, unable to come to any conclusion except such as John Splendidhelped him to.

  We lay, as I say, in the plump, each of us under his bush, and the wholeof us overhung a foot or two by a brow of land bound together by thespreading beech-roots. To any one standing on the _bruach_ we wereinvisible, but a step or two would bring him round to the foot of ourretreat and disclose the three of us.

  The hours passed, with us ensconced there--every hour the length of aday to our impatience and hunger; but still the way before was barred,for the coming and going of people in the valley was unceasing. We hadtalked at first eagerly in whispers, but at last grew tired of suchunnatural discourse, and began to sleep in snatches for sheer lack ofanything eke to do. It seemed we were prisoned there till nightfallat least, if the Athole man who found our cave did not track us to ourhiding.

  I lay on the right of my two friends, a little more awake, perhaps, thanthey, and so I was the first to perceive a little shaking of the soil,and knew that some one was coming down upon our hiding. We lay tense,our breathing caught at the chest, imposing on ourselves a stillnessthat swelled the noises of nature round about us--the wind, the river,the distant call of the crows--to a most clamorous and appalling degree.

  We could hear our visitor breathing as he moved about cautiously on thestunted grass above us, and so certain seemed discovery that we had ourlittle black knives lying naked along our wrists.

  The suspense parched me at the throat till I thought the rasping ofmy tongue on the roof of my palate seemed like the scraping of aheath-brush in a wooden churn. Unseen we were, we knew, but it waspatent that the man above us would be round in front of us at anymoment, and there we were to his plain eyesight! He was within threeyards of a steel death, even had he been Fin MacCoul; but the bank hewas standing on--or lying on, as we learned again--crumbled at the edgeand threw him among us in a different fashion from that we had lookedfor.

  My fingers were on his throat before I saw that we had for our visitornone other than young MacLachlan.

  He had his _sgian dubh_ almost at my stomach before our mutualrecognition saved the situation.

  "You're a great stranger," said John Splendid, with a fine pretence atmore coolness than he felt, "and yet I thought Cowal side would be moreto your fancy than real Argile in this vexatious time."

  "I wish to God I was on Cowal side now!" said the lad, ruefully. "Atthis minute I wouldn't give a finger-length of the Loch Eck road for thewhole of this rich strath."

  "I don't suppose you were forced over here," I commented.

  "As well here in one way as another," he said "I suppose you are unawarethat Montrose and MacDonald have overrun the whole country. They havesacked and burned the greater part of Cowal; they have gone down as faras Knapdale. I could have been in safety with my own people (and thebulk of your Inneraora people too) by going to Bute or Dunbarton, but Icould hardly do that with my kinsfolk still hereabouts in difficulties."

  "Where, where?" I cried; "and who do you mean?"

  He coughed, in a sort of confusion, I could see, and said he spoke ofthe Provost and his family.

  "But the Provost's gone, man!" said I, "and his family too."

  "My cousin Betty is not gone among them," said he; "she's either inthe castle yonder--and I hope to God she is--or a prisoner to theMacDonalds, or----"

  "The Worst Curse on their tribe!" cried John Splendid, in a fervour.

  Betty, it seemed, from a narrative that gave me a stound of anguish, hadnever managed to join her father in the boats going over to Cowal theday the MacDonalds attacked the town. Terror had seemingly sent her,carrying the child, away behind the town; for though her father andothers had put ashore again at the south bay, they could not see her,and she was still unfound when the triumph of the invader made flightneedful again.

  "Her father would have bided too," said MacLachlan, "but that he hadreason to believe she found the safety of the castle. Lying off the quaywhen the light was on, some of the people in the other boats saw a womanwith a burden run up the riverside to the back of the castle garden, andthere was still time to get over the draw-brig then."

  MacLachlan himself had come round by the head of the loch, and by goingthrough the Barrabhreac wood and over the shoulder of Duntorval, hadtaken Inneraora on the rear flank. He had lived several days in a bothyabove the Beannan on High Balantyre, and, like ourselves, depended onhis foraging upon the night and the luck of the woods.

  We lay among the whins and bramble undisturbed till the dusk came on.The rain had stopped, a few stars sedately decked the sky. Bursts oflaughing, the cries of comrades, bits of song, came on the air from thetown where the Irish caroused. At last between us and Dun-chuach thereseemed to be nothing to prevent us venturing on if the bridge was clear.

  "If not," said Sir Donald, "here's a doomed old man, for I know noswimming."

  "There's Edinburgh for you, and a gentleman's education!" said JohnSplendid, with a dry laugh; and he added, "But I daresay I could do theswimming for the both of us, Sir Donald I have carried
my accoutrementsdry over a German river ere now, and I think I could convey you safeover yon bit burn even if it were not so shallow above the bridge as Iexpect it is after these long frosts."

  "I would sooner force the bridge if ten men held it," said MacLachlan."I have a Highland hatred of the running stream, and small notion tosleep a night in wet tartan."

  John looked at the young fellow with a struggle for tolerance. "Well,well," he said; "we have all a touch of the fop in our youth."

  "True enough, you're not so young as you were once," put in MacLachlan,with a sly laugh.

  "I'm twenty at the heart," cried John,--"at the heart, man,--and do mylooks make me more than twice that age? I can sing you, or run you, ordance you. What I thought was that at your age I was dandified too aboutmy clothing. I'll give you the benefit of believing that it's not thesmall discomfort of a journey in wet tartan you vex yourself over.Have we not--we old campaigners of Lumsden's--soaked our plaids in therunning rivers of Low Germanie, and rolled them round us at night tomake our hides the warmer, our sleep the snugger? Oh, the old days! Oh,the stout days! God's name, but I ken one man who wearies of these tameand comfortable times!"

  "Whether or not," said Sir Donald, anxious to be on, "I wish the top ofDunchuach was under our brogues."

  "_Allons, mes amis_, then," said John, and out we set.

  Out we went, and we sped swiftly down to the bridge, feeling a sense ofsafety in the dark and the sound of the water that mourned in a hollowway under the wooden cabars. There was no sentinel, and we crossed dryand safely. On the other side, the fields, broken here and there bydry-stone dykes, a ditch or two, and one long thicket of shrubs, rosein a gentle ascent to the lime-kiln. We knew every foot of the way as'twere in our own pockets, and had small difficulty in pushing on in thedark. The night, beyond the kiln and its foreign trees, was loud withthe call of white-horned owls, sounding so human sometimes that it sentthe heart vaulting and brought us to pause in a flurried cluster on thepath that we followed closely as it twisted up the hill.

  However, we were in luck's way for once. Never a creature challenged ourprogress until we landed at the north wall of the fort, and crouching inthe rotten brake, cried, "Gate, oh!" to the occupants.

  A stir got up within; a torch flared on the wall, and a voice asked ourtartan and business.

  "Is that you, Para Mor?" cried John Splendid. "It's a time for shortceremony. Here are three or four of your closest friends terribly keento see the inside of a wall."

  "Barbreck, is't?" cried Para Mor, holding the flambeau over his headthat he might look down on us.

  "Who's that with the red tartan?" he asked, speaking of MacLachlan,whose garments shone garish in the light beside our dull Campbellcountry war-cloth.

  "Condemn your parley, Para Mor," cried Sir Donald; "it's youngMacLachlan,--open your doors!"

  And the gate in a little swung on its hinges to pass us in.