by John Buchan
Then came an hour of incontinent misery. He no sooner found the road than he lost it. The rain wet him to the skin, the wind buffeted his face till he was half-dazed, and ever and again he would find his horse floundering in a hag and panting miserably. The moor was seamed with craggy water-courses, and once astray from the track he could not tell what awful ravines lurked below the white shroud. The mere constant looking-for of danger became a bodily discomfort. His eyes were strained and aching, and his head seemed to swim with his incessant vigilance.
At last the flat ground ceased and he felt dimly that he was descending a slope. He could hear a loud rushing as of a multitude of streams, but the mist hid all from view. Sometimes the noise grew louder, sometimes it seemed to die away, and only the slipping of the horse on the sodden ground saluted his ears. He was cold, wet, and hungry, and now he began to be eerily afraid. This could be no path; he must be astray in this chaos of fierce hills, where precipice and loch barred the traveller’s way. By a resolute closing of his thoughts he kept his head, and gave all his care to holding up his horse. Meantime that strange din of waters was never silent: now and then he seemed almost on the edge of a great stream; but nothing appeared save the white wall and the wet earth beneath.
Then the expected mischance came, and with fatal suddenness. Gradually it became clear that his horse was slipping, and that the ground beneath was an abrupt green slope where no beast could find footing. He pulled it up by the head, but the time for restraint was over. The poor creature with terror in its eyes and its nose between its forelegs was sprawling down the hill ever nearer to the awful roar of cataracts. Francis after a second’s wild alarm flung himself from its back and fell on the slippery descent. The horse, eased of its burden, made one desperate effort to stop, but the struggle only quickened its speed. With a neigh of terror it went over some abrupt brink into some gulf of waters. The sound of the fall was drowned in the greater noise, and Francis was scarcely aware of it till he himself, clutching wildly at the spongy soil, shot over the verge into a spray-filled chasm.
He felt a great wash of waters over his head, and then with choking heart he came to the surface in the midst of a whirling, seething pool. He made feeble strokes for the shore, but all his efforts achieved was to carry him into the main line of the current. He felt himself being whirled downward, and then with a sickening thud he was driven against a rock. His left foot caught in a cranny. Down, far down, under the stream his head sank. He had no power to move his leg till by a merciful chance it slipped, and he was able once more to come to the top and ease his bursting heart. He felt his strength ebbing, and made futile clutches at every tuft of heather and jutting stone. But his hands had no power, and they all slipped from his grasp like the cords which a man in a nightmare lays hold on to drag himself from an abyss. It had soon been all over for this world with Mr. Francis Birkenshaw, if the storms of the last winter had not blown a rough pine-tree right athwart the torrent. The swollen waters lipped against its side, and he found himself washed close under the rugged bole. With despairing strength he gripped it and struggled till his head and breast lay over it. Then it was but a matter of time, and slowly inch by inch he worked his way to the bank and fell exhausted in a covert of bracken.
He lay for half an hour with the water forming pools at his side and feet. Then he shivered and half-roused himself to ease his breath. The thought of his horse struck him; it had long since gone to death among the misty waters. He crawled to his feet and essayed to walk, and then for the first time he felt his feebleness. His left ankle was broken, a mere trailing encumbrance with a hot fire burning in the splintered bone. His faculty of thought began to return to him, and he weighed brokenly the difficulties of his position. Speed was his aim; ere now he should have been near the house of Lovat’s cousin; and instead he was lying in a nameless ravine with his horse lost and his body maimed and shaken. He felt hazily that he was very ill, and at the helplessness of it all he leaned his head on a bank of heath and sobbed wearily.
Then he set his teeth and began to drag himself from the place. A deer-track seemed to lead upwards, and thither he crawled. At the top of the chasm he saw a hill-slope to the right and a glen in front which seemed to promise easier walking. He tried hard to think out his whereabouts, for it might be that this stream flowed back to the Ness waters and in following it he would be returning upon his tracks. But his mind refused its duty, and he could get nothing but a blank confusion. He had no hope now of fulfilling his mission and scarcely any desire; all he sought was to reach a human dwelling and have rest from his agony. His body was the seat of pain of which his bruised ankle was the smallest part. It was so bitterly cold that even in his anguish he felt the hostility of the weather. For the grey mist was drawing closer, and the land was growing mossier and rougher. Slowly, laboriously he limped through the waste, sinking up to the knee in bog-pools, or falling heavily on banks of stone. He was so scourged by rain that his clothes seemed no cover to his nakedness; he felt bleached and scourged as a whitening bone among the rocks.
Hitherto he had kept a tight curb upon his wandering wits. But as exhaustion grew upon him and the flickerings of hope died away, wild fancies arose, and he was hag-ridden by memory. He began to forget the disappointment of his errand, — how Mrs. Murray would call him faithless and believe him returned to his old paths, when all the while the Badenoch winds were blowing over his bones. He lost all immediate recollection, and in the stress of his physical want was back once more in the old Edinburgh days, busy picturing the gross plenty of the life. Now he was wearied, wet, and famishing, and as if to point the contrast there rose a vision of reeking suppers, of rich, greasy taverns, and blowsy serving-girls. His high sentiment of the past week was a thousand years away, and he revelled in the very unctuous vulgarity and dirt. There, at any rate, had been human warmth and comfort; and in that endless moorland his thoughts were lowered to the naked facts of life.
The mist hung more loosely, and it was possible to see some yards in front, though the sight was blinded by a solid sheet of rain. Rocks and dwarf trees raised their heads like islands, and a chance bog-pool seemed so vast that he crazily fancied he had come to the sea-coast. The path was growing easier, and a flat valley-bottom seemed to be taking the place of the precipitous glen. A trail of fog looked for a moment like smoke, and he hailed it as a sign of human dwelling; but as the mirage grew commoner even the comfort of delusion failed him, and a horror of great darkness grew upon his soul. His wits were growing clearer — intolerably clear. He saw the whole wretched panorama of his misfortunes, and the blank ending which stared in his face. His mind was still in the bondage of old memories, and the revulsion sickened and drove him crazy. He stopped and leaned on a crag to give himself breath, and as in a flash the memory of Mrs. Murray and all her high world passed over him with disgust unutterable.
“Curse her!” he cried. “Am I to be damned in hell for a woman’s face?” He poured forth a torrent of hideous abuse to the bleak weather. But for that proud jade with her face and hair he would have been content to seek common pleasures and the luxury of the unscrupulous. She seemed to mock him out of the fog, mock him with her beauty and her arrogant eyes. Passion made him half a maniac. He leaped forward with a drawn sword, but it fell from his nerveless hand and slashed his knees. “May she grow old and poor and withered, may she be a thing of the streets, may her pride be crushed in the gutter, may she see her friends killed before her eyes, and may she be damned immortally at the end!” And then his maledictions died away in a moan of weakness.
And now the cold seemed to have gone from the air, and his body grew hot with fever. Night was already beginning to turn the white wall of mist to black, and with the darkness came a surcease of storm. In still, dripping weather he stumbled onward down the valley. Flushes of heat passed over his face. Somewhere in his head a great wheel was revolving, and he forgot the pain of his foot in telling the number of its circles. One, two, three, he counted, six, ten, on
e hundred, and then he wandered into immensity. Something seemed to block his path, on which he hurled his weight despairingly. He felt himself borne back, and then the soft contact of the dripping earth, and the grip of a man’s hand. Then the darkness deepened into unconsciousness.
* * * * *
A sudden flash of light pierced his brain, and he seemed to be staring glassily through his eyes. He saw light — a fire, and the outline of a dwelling. Men seemed crowded all about him, choking him, pushing him for room, and laughing with idiot laughter. One held a point of light in his hand, which seemed the gold of a ring. Hazily he was conscious that this was his ring, which Lord Lovat had given him, and even in his utter ruin of body he felt the aching of the finger from which it had been roughly pulled. He cried for it like a child, and then the whole concourse seemed to leap upon him and stifle the life from his heart.
* * * * *
The days passed into weeks and months while Francis lay helpless and raving. Once he awoke and found himself on a bed of brackens in a low-roofed, smoke-filled hut. Snow blocked the window, and he saw that it was the winter-time. But the thick odour of the peat-reek choked him, and he sank again into that terrible deep slumber which lies on the boundary of death. Meantime the people of the cottage went in and out on their work, nursing cheerfully the stranger who lay by the wall. They had found him in the last stage of weakness on the hill, and would have doubtless left him to die but for the chance of plunder. And when they brought him to the light they saw the chief’s ring on his finger, so in all honesty, accepting this as a mandate from their lord, they had set themselves simply and ungrudgingly to nurse him to life. They were wretchedly poor, and could give him only the coarsest nourishment. The household, five in all, consisted of the father, Neil Mor na Cromag (Great Neil of the Shepherd’s Crook, as the words mean), who was a herd of Lovat’s on the farthest south-east hills of his territory. There were his wife and two sons, Rory, who played the pipes ravishingly, and Black John, who was his father’s helper, both tall, well-grown men, who flourished on the rough fare and toilsome life. Then there was a girl just growing to womanhood, whose name Francis never heard, for all spoke of her as M’eudail or Caileag Beg, when they were well-pleased, or harsher names, Oinseach — witless or shameless — when they were angry. But for the most part they were good-humoured, for the Lovat men were génial, cunning, and abundantly humourous, very little like the short, dark Campbells or the fiery Stewarts. There was a cow in a shed not five feet from his couch, and three goats fed on the hill. Thence they got milk, and at times a kid to roast. Also Neil Mor would get a sheep for himself now and then at the gatherings of the herds, when he tossed the caber a yard further than any other, and he would sometimes take deer on the mountains and trout and salmon in the river. At times he even went down to the corn country, and bought bolls of fine meal, which all relished gladly after the tiresome diet of flesh and herbs. But they prospered all of them on the fare, and grew ruddy, full-blooded, and straight of limb. All day the men-folk were out on the hills, while the women cooked meals or carded wool in the firelight. Then at night Rory would get out his pipes and play springs which set the feet trembling, or sad wild strains of the men of old and the great kings of the North and the days that are gone. Sometimes, too, he played a lilt of the fairies who dwell in the green-wood and the crooks of glens, and the listeners would hush their breath and look to the barring of the door.
In the height of his illness the people of the cottage had given Francis up for dead, and walked with stealthy step and spoke softly as befitting those with death in the house. The winter was mild, but some blasts of snow came from Monadliadh, and made the women heap on peats and wood and choke the room with smoke. All this was little good for the sick man who lay wrestling with fever. They had dressed his ankle and put it in the way of healing; but the more dangerous ailment was so little known to them that they came near to killing him altogether, for they used to bathe his brow with cold well-water, and allow him to toss the coverings from his body. But for his extreme strength he would have died in the first week. As it was, the fever burned him to a shadow and then fled, and he was left with just sufficient life to struggle through. For two days his life trembled; then his eager vitality triumphed, and slowly he began to mend.
The people had little English, and they were so far from the chief’s dwelling that they heard nothing of what happened. Francis in his ravings had often mentioned Lovat’s name, and they heard with nods of recognition, arguing that this was some trusted friend of the great lord’s. When dawning consciousness brought him power of speech, the whole miserable and futile tale of his misfortunes was clear in his memory, and he realised how bitterly he had failed. He strove to find out the turn of events from his hosts, but one and all they were ignorant. They knew dimly of a certain Tearlach, who was said to be a Stewart and a king, and they had heard that all the Rannoch and Athole men and the western clans had taken the field with him. But it was as nothing to them, for the old kings of Scots had no place in their mythology, which embraced so many other kings, and no straggler of Tearlach’s had ever strayed to their door. But they told him of other things, all the simple talk of their narrow world; and strangely enough, these men who had rescued him with designs of plunder now cheered his recovery as if he had been their own blood-brother. Rory would play him soft, low tunes on the pipes, and John would tell of the days of herding and hunting; and every one waited on him with grave, silent courtesy.
But on the girl fell the chief share of his entertainment. She was little compared with her tall brothers, but wonderfully slim and active, with eyes like sloes, hair blown over brow, and a crooning voice. In the early days of his recovery, while he still lay on his back, she would give him food and bend over him with strange Gaelic caresses in the frankness of innocent pity. She was never more than half-dressed, for indoors her breast and shoulders were always bare, and outside a plaid was all their covering. Then as he grew stronger and the early spring came, he would lean on her as he hobbled out of doors, and sit by her side on the green bank above the stream or in the midst of birches on the hill. As colour came back to his cheeks and some of his old vigour to his frame, it may be that the simple child fell in love with the tall stranger. Be this as it may, no thought on the matter ever crossed his mind. He endured her pitying caresses and the warm touch of her skin without a tremor. He had never been the prey of such emotions, and now he was something less than before. The fever had purged him of much of his old fervour, and raised, as it were, a bar between this new man and his old life. The one thing which survived strong and vivid from the wreck of memory was the image of the lady who had sent him on this errand, and even in the thought of this goddess his former boyish sentiment had departed. It was a grave, old-featured man who looked down the glen of an afternoon and prayed for the return of full strength and tried to redd the tangle of his affairs.
Then at last it befell that one evening Neil Mor returned from a lambing-visit to the Nairnside with news. Tearlach had come again, this time from the South, with a great tail of dhuinewassels and Sassenach lords, and a following of Macdonalds and the like. Also the folk said that the Southron forces were waiting for him in the North and that a great battle would be fought ere the moon was old. Francis puzzled over this word, and by dint of counting the weeks of his own illness, guessed at the truth. Some great misfortune had overtaken the Prince in the South, and he had returned hither to make his stand. His services might still be wanted. The whole news was so vague that he might yet have the chance to fulfil his errand. So with new hope he set about brushing his garments and preparing for the way.
CHAPTER XI. The Prince’s Cabinet of War.
Black John set him some miles on his way, leading him down glen and up corry till he brought him out on the strath of Nairn. The day was warm for a northern spring, and the guide grew exceeding cheerful and hymned the joys of war. “There will be braw battles,” he cried, “for all the craws will be fleeing north, and th
ey are the birds that ken.” Sometimes they met a lonely shepherd, and then John would stop for a parley in Gaelic and leave Francis to find the path for a mile or so alone. But when once they sighted the broad river valley, he left him with shrill farewells. “If seed o’ mine meet seed o’ yours,” he said, “brothers they sall be,” and he spat in his hand and clasped his parting guest’s.
And now it was clearly the seat of war, for the tracks in the vale were rough with ruts and all the meadowland was trampled. There were few houses in the land — now and then a turf sheiling on the brae-face and once the grey wall of a castle; but the place was Lowland and habitable contrasted with the wild country he had dwelled in. He had already walked far, and soon his head began to swim with faintness. It was a long toil for a man so lately sick, and it was with many pauses and long, helpless reclinings on the wayside heather that he made the journey. He had a desperate fear of falling ill a second time, — a thing bitter to dream of now on the very seat of war. And yet his hopes hung on the frail thread of his strength, so with circumspect and elderly care he nursed his body, choosing dry places to lie on, drinking but moderately from the hillburns, and sipping the whisky which he had carried out with him from the morning.