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

by Neil Munro

  CHAPTER XXIX.--THE RETURN.

  We got a cold welcome from the women of our own clan and country. Theyhad been very warm and flattering as we passed north--the best they hadwas not good enough for us; now they eyed us askance as we went amongthem in the morning. Glenurchy at its foot was wailing with one loudunceasing coronach made up of many lamentations, for no poor croft, nokeep, no steading in all the countryside almost, but had lost its man atInverlochy. It was terrible to hear those sounds and see those sightsof frantic women setting every thought of life aside to give themselveswholly to their epitaphs for the men who would come no more.

  For ordinary our women keen but when they are up in years and withoutthe flowers of the cheek that the salt tear renders ugly; women who havehad good practice with grief, who are so far off from the fore-worldof childhood where heaven is about the dubs of the door that they findsomething of a dismal pleasure in making wails for a penny or two or acogie of soldier's brose. They would as soon be weeping as singing; haveyou not seen them hurrying to the hut to coronach upon a corpse,with the eager step of girls going to the last dance of the harvest?Beldames, witches, I hate your dirges, that are but an old custom oflamentation! But Glenurchy and Lochow to-day depended for their sorrowupon no hired mourners, upon no aged play-actors at the passion ofgrief; cherry-cheeked maidens wept as copiously as their grand-dames,and so this universal coronach that rose and fell on the wind round byStronmealchan and Inish-trynich, and even out upon the little isles thatsnuggle in the shadow of Cruachan Ben, had many an unaccustomed note;many a cry of anguish from the deepest well of sorrow came to the ear.To walk by a lake and hear griefs chant upon neighbouring isles isthe chief of the Hundred Dolours. Of itself it was enough to make usmelancholy and bitter, but it was worse to see in the faces of old womenand men who passed us surly on the road, the grudge that we had beenspared, we gentlemen in the relics of fine garments, while their ownlads had been taken. It was half envy that we, and not their own,still lived, and half anger that we had been useless in preventingthe slaughter of their kinsmen. As we walked in their averted or surlylooks, we had no heart to resent them, for was it not human nature? Evenwhen a very old crooked man with a beard like the foam of the linn, andeyes worn deep in their black sockets by constant staring upon care, andthrough the black mystery of life, stood at his door among his wailingdaughters, and added to his rhyming a scurrilous verse whereof we werethe subjects, we did no more than hurry our pace.

  By the irony of nature it was a day bright and sunny; the _londubh_parted his beak of gold and warbled flutey from the grove, indifferentto all this sorrow of the human world. Only in far-up gashes of thehills was there any remnant of the snow we had seen cover the countrylike a cloak but a few days before. The crows moved briskly about in thetrees of Cladich, and in roupy voices said it might be February of thefull dykes but surely winter was over and gone. Lucky birds! they weresure enough of their meals among the soft soil that now followed thefrost in the fields and gardens; but the cotters, when their new griefwas weary, would find it hard to secure a dinner in all the country onceso well provided with herds and hunters, now reft of both.

  I was sick of this most doleful expedition; M'Iver was no less, but hemingled his pity for the wretches about us with a shrewd care for thefirst chance of helping some of them. It came to him unexpectedly in adark corner of the way through Cladich wood, where a yeld hind lay witha broken leg at the foot of a creag or rock upon which it must havestumbled. Up he hurried, and despatched and gralloched it with his_sgian dubh_ in a twinkling, and then he ran back to a cot where womenand children half craved us as we passed, and took some of them up tothis lucky find and divided the spoil It was a thin beast, a prey nodoubt to the inclement weather, with ivy and acorn, its last meal, stillin its paunch.

  It was not, however, till we had got down Glenaora as far as Carnus thatwe found either kindness or conversation. In that pleasant huddle ofsmall cothouses, the Macarthurs, aye a dour and buoyant race, weremaking up their homes again as fast as they could, inspired by the oldphilosophy that if an inscrutable God should level a poor man's dwellingwith the dust of the valley, he should even take the stroke withcalmness and start to the building again. So the Macarthurs, someof them back from their flight before Antrim and Athole, were throngbearing stone from the river and turf from the brae, and setting upthose homes of the poor, that have this advantage over the homes of thewealthy, that they are so easily replaced. In this same Carnus, in lateryears, I have made a meal that showed curiously the resource of itspeople. Hunting one day, I went to a little cothouse there and asked forsomething to eat A field of unreaped barley stood ripe and dry beforethe door. Out the housewife went and cut some straws of it, while herdaughter shook cream in a bottle, chanting a churn-charm the while. Thestraw was burned to dry the grain, the breeze win'd it, the quern groundit, the fire cooked the bannocks of it Then a cow was milked, a coupleof eggs were found in the loft, and I sat down in a marvellously shortspace of time to bread and butter, milk, eggs, and a little drop ofspirits that was the only ready-made provand in the house. And thoughnow they were divided between the making of coronachs and the buildingof their homes, they had still the art to pick a dinner, as it were, offthe lichened stone.

  There was one they called Niall Mor a Chamais (Big Neil of Karnes), whoin his day won the applause of courts by slaying the Italian bully whobragged Scotland for power of thew, and I liked Niall Mor's word to usas we proceeded on our way to Inneraora.

  "Don't think," said he, "that MacCailein's beat yet, or that the boar'stusks are reaped from his jaw. I am of an older clan than Campbell, andcloser on Diarmaid than Argile himself; but we are all under the onebanner now, and I'll tell you two gentlemen something. They may tearCastle Inneraora out at the roots, stable their horses in the yard ofKilmalieu, and tread real Argile in the clay, but well be even with themyet. I have an arm here" (and he held up a bloody-looking limb, hashedat Inverlochy); "I'll build my home when this is mended, and i'llchallenge MacDonald till my mouth is gagged with the clod."

  "And they tell me your son is dead yonder," I said, pitying the old manwho had now no wife nor child.

  "So they tell me," said he; "that's the will of God, and better a fastdeath on the field than a decline on the feather-bed. I'll be weepingfor my boy when I have bigged my house again and paid a call to some ofhis enemies."

  Niall Mot's philosophy was very much that of all the people of the glen,such of them as were left. They busily built their homes and pondered,as they wrought, on the score to pay.

  "That's just like me," M'Iver would say after speeches like that ofNiall Mor. He was ever one who found of a sudden all another person'straits in his own bosom when their existence was first manifested tohim. "That's just like me myself; we are a beaten clan (in a fashion),but we have our chief and many a thousand swords to the fore yet Ideclare to you I am quite cheery thinking we will be coming backagain to those glens and mounts we have found so cruel because of ourloneliness, and giving the MacDonalds and the rest of the duddy crew thesword in a double dose."

  "Ay, John," said I, "it's easy for you to be light-hearted in thematter. You may readily build your bachelor's house at Barbreck, and Imay set up again the barn at Elrigmore; but where husband or son is goneit's a different story. For love is a passion stronger than hate. Areyou not wondering that those good folk on either hand of us shouldnot be so stricken that they would be sitting in ashes, weeping likeRachel?"

  "We are a different stuff from the lady you mention," he said; "I amaye thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, andscalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselveswarm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation nowand then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting todecay. The world's well divided after all, and the happiness as well asthe dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife norchild I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me,and they manage to make up their sha
re of content with reflections uponthe sweetness of revenge. There was never a man so poor and miserable inthis world yet but he had his share of it, even if he had to seek it inthe bottle. Amn't I rather clever to think of it now? Have you heard ofthe idea in your classes?"

  "It is a notion very antique," I confessed, to his annoyance; "but itis always to your credit to have thought it out for yourself. It isa notion discredited here and there by people of judgment, but a verycomfortable delusion (if it is one) for such as are well off, and wouldsalve their consciences against the miseries of the poor and distressed.And perhaps, after all, you and the wise man of old are right; thelowest state--even the swineherd's--may have as many compensations asthat of his master the Earl. It is only sin, as my father would say,that keeps the soul in a welter------"

  "Does it indeed?" said John, lightly; "the merriest men ever I met wererogues. I've had some vices myself in foreign countries, though I ayehad the grace never to mention them, and I ken I ought to be stewingwith remorse for them, but am I?"

  "Are you?" I asked.

  "If you put it so straight, I'll say No--save at my best, and my bestis my rarest But come, come, we are not going into Inneraora on adebate-parade; let us change the subject Do you know I'm like a boy witha sweet-cake in this entrance to our native place. I would like not togulp down the experience all at once like a glutton, but to nibble roundthe edges of it We'll take the highway by the shoulder of Creag Dubh,and let the loch slip into our view."

  I readily enough fell in with a plan that took us a bit off our way, forI was in a glow of eagerness and apprehension. My passion to come homewas as great as on the night I rode up from Skipness after my sevenyears of war, even greater perhaps, for I was returning to a home nowfull of more problems than then. The restitution of my father's housewas to be set about, six months of hard stint were perhaps to be facedby my people, and, above all, I had to find out how it stood between acertain lady and me.

  Coming this way from Lochow, the traveller will get his first sight ofthe waters of Loch Finne by standing on a stone that lies upon a littleknowe above his lordship's stables. It is a spot, they say, Argilehimself had a keen relish for, and after a day of chasing the deer amongthe hills and woods, sometimes would he come and stand there and lookwith satisfaction on his country. For he could see the fat, rich fieldsof his policies there, and the tumultuous sea that swarms with fish,and to his left he could witness Glenaora and all the piled-up numerousmountains that are full of story if not of crop. To this little knoweM'Iver and I made our way. I would have rushed on it with a boy'simpetuousness, but he stopped me with a hand on the sleeve.

  "Canny, canny," said he, "let us get the very best of it There's a cloudon the sun that'll make Finne as cold, flat, and dead as lead; wait tillit passes."

  We waited but a second or two, and then the sun shot out above us, andwe stepped on the hillock and we looked, with our bonnets in our hands.

  Loch Finne stretched out before us, a spread of twinkling silver wavesthat searched into the curves of a myriad bays; it was dotted withskiffs. And the yellow light of the early year gilded the remotest hillsof Ardno and Ben Ime, and the Old Man Mountain lifted his ancient rimychin, still merrily defiant, to the sky. The parks had a greener huethan any we had seen to the north; the town revealed but its higherchimneys and the gable of the kirk, still its smoke told of occupation;the castle frowned as of old, and over all rose Dunchuach.

  "O Dunchuach! Dunchuach!" cried M'Iver, in an ecstasy, spreading outhis arms, and I thought of the old war-worn Greeks who came with wearymarches to their native seas.

  "Dunchuach! Dunchuach!" he said; "far have I wandered, and many a townI've seen, and many a prospect that was fine, and I have made songsto maids and mountains, and foreign castles too, but never a verse toDunchuach. I do not know the words, but at my heart is lilting the verytune, and the spirit of it is here at my breast."

  Then the apple rose in his throat, and he turned him round about that Imight not guess the tear was at his eye.

  "Tuts," said I, broken, "'tis at my own; I feel like a girl."

  "Just a tickling at the pap o' the hass," he said in English; and thenwe both laughed.

  It was the afternoon when we got into the town. The street was in thegreat confusion of a fair-day, crowded with burgesses and landwardtenants, men and women from all parts of the countryside still ontheir way back from flight, or gathered for news of Inverlochy fromthe survivors, of whom we were the last to arrive. Tradesmen from theLowlands were busy fitting shops and houses with doors and windows, orfilling up the gaps made by fire in the long lands, for MacCailein'sfirst thought on his return from Edinburgh had been the comfort of thecommon people. Seamen clamoured at the quay, loud-spoken mariners fromthe ports of Clyde and Leven and their busses tugged at anchor in theupper bay or sat shoulder to shoulder in a friendly congregation underthe breast-wall, laden to the beams with merchandise and provenderfor this hungry country. If Inneraora had been keening for the lost ofInverlochy, it had got over it; at least we found no public lamentationsuch as made our traverse on Lochow-side so dreary. Rather was theresomething eager and rapt about the comportment of the people. Theytalked little of what was over and bye with, except to curse our Lowlandtroops, whose unacquaintance with native war had lost us Inverlochy.The women went about their business, red-eyed, wan, silent, for the mostpart; the men mortgaged the future, and drowned care in debauchery inthe alehouses. A town all out of its ordinary, tapsilteerie. Walking init, I was beat to imagine clearly what it had been like in its placidday of peace. I could never think of it as ever again to be free fromthis most tawdry aspect of war, a community in good order, with the daymoving from dawn to dusk with douce steps, and no sharp agony at thepublic breast.

  But we had no excuse for lingering long over our entrance upon its blueflagstone pavements; our first duty was to report ourselves in person toour commander, whose return to Inneraora Castle we had been apprised ofat Cladich.