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

by Neil Munro

  CHAPTER XVIII.--BARD OF KEPPOCH.

  He was a lantern-jawed, sallow-faced, high-browed fellow in his prime,with the merest hint of a hirple or halt in his walk, very shabby in hisdress, wearing no sporran, but with a dagger bobbing about at his groin.I have never seen a man with surprise more sharply stamped on his visagethan was betrayed by this one when he got close upon us and found two ofa clan so unlikely to have stray members out for a careless airing on aforenoon in Badenoch.

  "You're taking your walk?" he said, with a bantering tone, after amoment's pause.

  "You couldn't have guessed better," said John. "We are taking all we'relikely to get in so barren a country."

  The stranger chuckled sourly as the three of us stood in a groupsurveying each other. "My name," said he, in his odd north Gaelic, andthrowing out his narrow chest, "is John MacDonad I'm Keppoch's bard, andI've no doubt you have heard many of my songs. I'm namely in the worldfor the best songs wit ever strung together. Are you for war? I can stiryou with a stave to set your sinews straining. Are you for the music ofthe wood? The thrush itself would be jealous of my note. Are you for theditty of the lover? Here's the songster to break hearts. Since the startof time there have been 'prentices at my trade: I have challenged Northand East, South and the isle-flecked sea, and they cry me back theirmaster."

  M'Iver put a toe on one of mine, and said he, "Amn't I the unlucky man,for I never heard of you?"

  "Tut, tut," cried the bard in a fret, "perhaps you think so much inArgile of your hedge-chanters that you give the lark of the air no ear."

  "We have so many poets between Knapdale and Cruachan," said John, "thatthe business is fallen out of repute, and men brag when they can make anhonest living at prose."

  "Honest living," said the bard, "would be the last thing I would expectClan Campbell to brag of."

  He was still in an annoyance at the set-back to his vanity, shufflinghis feet restlessly on the ground, and ill at ease about the mouth,that I've noticed is the first feature to show a wound to the conceit.

  "Come, come," he went on, "will you dare tell me that the sheilingsingers on Loch Finneside have never heard my 'Harp of the Trees'? Ifthere's a finer song of its kind in all Albainn I've yet to learn it."

  "If I heard it," said John, "I've forgotten it."

  "Name of God!" cried the bard in amaze, "you couldn't; it goes so"--andhe hummed the tune that every one in Argile and the west had beensinging some years before.

  We pretended to listen with eagerness to recall a single strain ofit, and affected to find no familiar note. He tried others of hisbudget--some rare and beautiful songs, I must frankly own: some we knewby fragments; some we had sung in the wood of Creag Dubh--but to eachand all John Splendid raised a vacant face and denied acquaintance.

  "No doubt," said he, "they are esteemed in the glens of Keppoch, butArgile is fairly happy without them. Do you do anything else for aliving but string rhymes?"

  The bard was in a sweat of vexation. "I've wandered far," said he, "andyou beat all I met in a multitude of people. Do you think the stringingof rhymes so easy that a man should be digging and toiling in the fieldand the wood between his _duans_?"

  "I think," said Splendid (and it was the only time a note of earnestnesswas in his utterance)--"I think his songs would be all the better forsome such manly interregnum. You sing of battles: have you felt theblood rush behind the eyes and the void of courageous alarm at thepit of the stomach? You hum of grief: have you known the horror of adesolate home? Love,--sir, you are young, young------"

  "Thanks be with you," said the bard; "your last word gives me the clueto my answer to your first I have neither fought nor sorrowed in theactual fact; but I have loved, not a maid (perhaps), nor in errantfreaks of the mind, but a something unnameable and remote, witha bounteous overflowing of the spirit. And that way I learned thesplendour of war as I sat by the fire; and the widows of my fancy wringmy heart with a sorrow as deep as the ruined homes your clan have madein my country could confer."

  I'm afraid I but half comprehended his meaning, but the rapture of hiseye infected me like a glisk of the sun. He was a plain, gawky, nervousman, very freckled at the hands, and as poor a leg in the kilt as wellcould be. He was fronting us with the unspoken superiority of the fowlon its own midden, but he had a most heart-some and invigorating glow.

  "John Lorn, John Lom!" I cried, "I heard a soldier sing your songs inthe ship Archangel of Leith that took us to Elsinore."

  He turned with a grateful eye from M'Iver to me, and I felt that I hadone friend now in Badenoch.

  "Do you tell me?" he asked, a very child in his pleasure, that JohnSplendid told me after he had not the heart to mar. "Which one did theysing--'The Harp of the Trees' or 'Macrannul Og's Lament'? I am sure itwould be the Lament: it is touched with the sorrow of the starlessnight on a rain-drummed, wailing sea. Or perhaps they knew--the gentlehearts--my 'Farewell to the Fisher.' I made it with yon tremor of joy,and it is telling of the far isles beyond Uist and Barra, and the SevenHunters, and the white sands of Colomkill."

  M'Iver sat down on the wayside and whittled a stick with a pretence atpatience I knew he could scarcely feel, for we were fools to be dallyingthus on the way in broad morning when we should be harking back to ourfriends as secretly as the fox.

  "Were you on the ocean?" he asked the bard, whose rapture was notabated.

  "Never," said he, "but I know Linnhe and Loch Eil and the fringe ofMorar."

  "Mere dubs," said M'Iver, pleasantly--"mere dubs or ditches. Now I,Barbreck, have been upon the deeps, tossed for days at hazard without aheadland to the view. I may have made verse on the experience,--I'll notsay yea or nay to that,--but I never gave a lochan credit for washingthe bulged sides of the world."

  "You hadn't fancy for it, my good fellow," said the bard, angry again."I forgot to say that I saw Loch Finne too, and the Galley of Lorntaking MacCailein off from his castle. I'm making a song on that now."

  "Touched!" thinks I, for it was a rapier-point at my comrade's verymarrow. He reddened at once, pulled down his brows, and scanned the bardof Keppoch, who showed his knowledge of his advantage.

  "If I were you," said John in a little, "I would not put the finish onthat ditty till I learned the end of the transaction. Perhaps MacCailein(and God bless my chief!) is closer on Lochiel and Lochaber to-day thanyou give him credit for."

  "Say nothing about that," said I warningly in English to my friend,never knowing (what I learned on a later occasion) that John Lorn hadthe language as well as myself.

  "When MacCailein comes here," said the bard, "he'll get a Badenochwelcome."

  "And that is the thief's welcome, the shirt off his very back," criedM'Iver.

  "Off his back very likely," said the bard; "it's the back we seeoftenest of the bonny gentleman."

  M'Iver grew livid to the very lip, and sprang to his feet, dutchingwith great menace the black knife he had been whittling with. Not a bitabashed, the bard pulled out his dirk, and there was like to be a prettyto-do when I put between them.

  The issue of the quarrel that thus I retarded was postponed altogetherby a circumstance that changed the whole course of our adventure in thiswild country,--severed us at a sharp wrench from the Campbell regiments,and gave us the chance--very unwelcome it was--of beholding the mannerof war followed by Alasdair MacDonald's savage tribes. It happened in aflash, without warning. No blow had been struck by the two gentlemenat variance, when we were all three thrown to the ground, and the boundprisoners of a squad of Macgregors who had got out of the thicket andround us unobserved in the heat of the argument.

  They treated us all alike--the bard as curt as the Campbells, in spiteof his tartan,--and without exchanging any words with us marched usbefore them on a journey of several hours to Kilcumin.

  Long or ever we reached Kilcumin we were manifestly in the neighbourhoodof Montrose's force. His pickets held the road; the hillsides moved withhis scouts. On a plain called Leiter-nan-lub the battalion lay camped, amere fr
agment of the force that brought ruin to Argile: Athol men underthe Tutor of Struan, Stewarts of Appin, Maclans of Glencoe, a few of themore sedate men of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Maclean, as well as a handfulof the Gregaraich who had captured us. It was the nightfall when we wereturned into the presence of Sir Alasdair, who was sitting under a fewells of canvas playing cartes with some chieftains by the light of afir-root fire.

  "Whom have we here?" said he, never stopping for more than a glimpse ofus.

  "Two Campbells and a man who says he's bard of Keppoch," he was told.

  "A spy in an honest tartan, no doubt," said Sir Alas-dair; "but well putit to the test with Keppoch himself: tell him to come over and throw aneye on the fellow."

  Keppoch was sent for, and came across from a fire at another part of thefield, a hiccough at his throat and a blear look in his eye as one thathas been overly brisk with the bottle, but still and on the gentlemanand in a very good humour.

  "Here's my bard sure enough!" he cried. "John, John, what do you seek inKilcumin, and in Campbell company too?"

  "The company is none of my seeking," said John Lorn, very short andblunt "And we're like to have a good deal more of the same clan'scompany than we want before long, for Argile and his clan to three timesyour number are at Inverlochy. I have tramped a weary day to tell youthe tale, and I get but a spy's reception."

  The tale went round the camp in the time a man would whistle an air. Upcame Montrose on the instant, and he was the first to give us acivil look. But for him we had no doubt got a short quittance fromMacColkitto, who was for the tow gravatte on the spot Instead wewere put on parole when his lordship learned we had been Cavaliers offortune. The moon rose with every sign of storm, the mountains lay aboutwhite to their foundations, and ardent winds belched from the glens, butby mountain and glen Mac Donald determined to get round on the flank ofArgile.