He fled to the garrison at Perth, told his Campbells to go home, and the rest of the army to shift for themselves, then went with Lothian to Edinburgh, quarrelling all the way. At Edinburgh, the Committee of Estates inquired with the utmost respect what he had done beyond tiring out his soldiers and Lothian’s by coursing three times over round about Spey and Atholl; and in answer, he complained that through envy or emulation or negligence or inability, or all of them, he had not been properly supported.
A rude voice called out, ‘What’s wrong with three thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse?’ but was promptly quenched. With now exaggerated politeness, the Estates thanked him for his invaluable services, and commended him for having shed so little blood.
But Argyll, still ‘much grieved’, surrendered his commission as General-in-chief of the Covenanters. It was offered to Lothian, who refused to touch it ‘for any request’, and so did one general after the other until General Baillie, who had proved himself one of Leven’s best soldiers in England, reluctantly consented.
Argyll thanked God that he had washed his hands of it. He too went home, to spend Christmas in his castle at Inveraray – not in vain jesting and merriment as his enemy had done at Kincardine three years ago, when Argyll had in his misguided clemency released him from prison – but in study and philosophical discussion, and family prayers for two hours every morning and evening, and sermons by distinguished preachers.
The little seaport town of Inveraray, with its new schools and shops, was a centre of the modern theology and of education and of commerce, as befitted the capital of the Campbell kingdom. An impregnable kingdom it was, isolated out there on the western coast, yet far inland at the end of Loch Fyne, and as its kings had often boasted, secured from attack by the sea on the one hand, and on the other by high mountains, to whose few and dangerous passes only the Campbell scouts held the key. Argyll himself had often said he would rather lose a hundred thousand florins (no mean test) than that any mortal but a Campbell should know those mountain passes to his country. It was easier to reach it from France and Spain than from inland Scotland, so that for generations it had been at peace, and could devote itself to commerce with Europe. The Clan Campbell was therefore more civilized as well as more prosperous than its neighbours. Could anything be happier than this godly household, the centre of its little world, living in perfect peace and security? So its head demanded of his family, and his devoted wife agreed with all her wonted tender reassurance.
But his son, Archibald, young Lord Lome, complained bitterly to his mother at finding that he was to be given an English Bible and the Practice of Piety for Christmas presents (though it was only owing to her long hours of intervention that he was to be allowed any at all), and threatened to run away before Christmas to escape the six long sermons that would commemorate that former festival as a fast day.
Argyll suspected another motive for this threat; Archibald had been tiresomely persistent with his questions about Lord Graham, his junior, who was fighting by the side of his father – and Argyll told his wife that his own son wished to desert him for the side of that malignant destroyer, Montrose. Poor Margaret wept, and tried to assure her husband of her son’s love for him; but he found more consolation in writing down his reflections. Some day he would compile them into a book of letters to his son; then even that ungrateful lad would see how much wisdom and experience his father could lay at his disposal, if only he would ever use it.
But rather oddly, with all his brains, he had no ease in writing – his jottings on Religion and Study and Courage struck him as cramped and inexpressive. It must be because he did things, rather than wrote them, he told himself – a man of action, that was it – and there again was confronted with the thought of Montrose, who wrote both prose and poetry of as clear and ringing a quality as his words in battle.
Was he to be for ever worsted by his rival? At least he could show how little value there was in these showy and facile qualities.
So he wrote, ‘Courage loses its merited honour, if wilfulness and overguided petulancy overbear it; a well-grounded reason, without prejudice to a man’s honour, may justly countermand a rash and inconsiderate resolution.’
This gave him pleasure, until at last the pen took charge, as it will do at times with even the unreadiest writer, and some impulse of sincerity, unintentional and most unwelcome, made him add – ‘It is better to trust in valour than in policy.’
Chapter Thirteen
Alasdair had come out of the west again at last, and well did he justify his absence, for he brought with him five hundred more of the Scottish Macdonalds of the Isles and Clanranald and Glengarry and Glencoe, also recruits from other clans such as the Stewarts and Macleans and the Camerons of Lochaber.
He met his Commander on their old trysting ground of Atholl, and great was the rejoicing and the feasting that they held at Blair Castle, which Montrose had managed to keep as a permanent base to his operations throughout the autumn. So many more heroes had to be introduced, so much had to be told, to be drunk to and congratulated on, that the late November night was scarcely long enough for it all.
Alasdair had heard of Fyvie, slapped O’Cahan on the back and called him the General’s powder-monkey, and insisted on Lord Graham telling him about his raid on the chamber-pots. In Alasdair’s opinion the miserable softness and degeneracy of most of the Lowland lords was due to just that effeminate invention, as if a man dared not put his nose or anything else out of doors on a brisk night.
And now to business. What were the plans for the winter? One of the chief objectives of that autumn had been carried – Argyll’s army had been kept away from the operations of the war in England, and not only prevented from joining up with Leven’s army there, but had had to demand reinforcements from it; the Seat of Government had been kept perpetually on the run, and small prestige was left to it.
Montrose had hoped to sweep down on the Border, where Leven’s army had retired from England to its winter quarters, but the only moment when this had been possible had been just that when his Lowland gentry were all availing themselves of Argyll’s obliging offer of free passes to their homes.
Now it was the Highlanders’ turn to reject the plan because they had no interest in its objective. King and Covenant were as yet new-fangled and artificial interests compared with the age-old motives of their warfare. All these clans and septs were now banded together by one common impulse, their hatred of the encroaching power of their great rival; and one prayer at least they could all most religiously utter in unison:
‘From the greed of the Campbells,
Good Lord, deliver us!’
Montrose could give his army no pay, he was as dependent on their goodwill as if they were boys who had chosen to play a game together. He must play their game, if he were ever to get them to play his. His hope was to get them to the Border and finally to join the King’s armies in England; but he could not do that until he had smashed utterly the King’s enemies in Scotland.
The chief of those enemies now reposed safely in the inaccessible fortress of Inveraray.
‘The fox is snug in his lair,’ said Alasdair, ‘and no enemy has ever yet won through into the heart of the Campbell country, even in summer.’
‘Can the mountain passes be crossed at all in midwinter?’ asked Montrose, ‘and what hope is there of our stumbling on them? And what cities and food should we find across the mountains?’
Said Angus MacAlain Duibh, a Macdonald of Glencoe, ‘I know every farm belonging to MacCaillan Mhor, and you need never want for tight houses, fat cattle and clear water.’
‘So be it,’ said Montrose, ‘the fox is snug in his lair, and we will ferret him out.’
But he would not let his old tutor endure such another march as that which he had just led him across the Grampians down on to Atholl. He told Master Forrett that he would have no accounts now to draw up between the wolves and the eagles in Badenoch; he must return to Kinnaird.
Forrett
refused at first to obey.
‘Would I ever let your Lordship play truant when you were my pupil, and do you now command your tutor to do so? It is against all law and order.’
But Montrose laughed back at him that it was in accordance with the old Irish law, as he had learned from Alasdair – ‘To help him against poverty, and to support him in old age, these are due from the pupil to the tutor.’ How could he support Master Forrett’s old age against the poverty of the mountains better than by driving him out of them?
Just as he was saying goodbye to him, and Johnnie was giving message after message to young James about the care of Ruddy, his red setter, and his hawks, and all the stories about the campaign that he was to be sure and tell him – Montrose had a sudden impulse to go too, with his son, and both pay a flying visit to their home for a few hours before they started on this mad enterprise into the mountains.
They rode by night, sent on a messenger to warn Lord South-esk on the morning of their arrival, which must be kept as secret as possible, and snatched two clear days and one night at home.
And Master Forrett sat blinking like a little contented owl at the sound roof above his head, and the blazing fire before his feet, and asked James questions in Latin to see how much he had fallen off since he had ceased to tutor him, but was too happy to pay much attention to the answers.
There was some question as to whether Johnnie could not stay now as well as Forrett, and avoid the terrible rigours of the coming winter campaign. But even Southesk thought it more dangerous for him to stay than to go, since the Covenant were bent on ‘making examples’, and what better one could there be than young Lord Graham, who had moreover now taken up against the Covenant?
‘So he must go on with you,’ said Magdalen, ‘“since you’ve left him no other guide.”’
The line from the song slid out inadvertently, the only touch of bitterness in their snatched bliss. Never had it been so exquisite, nor so precarious. His visit might endanger the house he loved so well, yet he could not reproach himself for it, since to Magdalen it was now worth any danger.
There was no fear left in her love. She had won clear of it. Both their minds were still; body and spirit had transcended them. Three safe years with Jamie had once been not long enough to quiet her anxious heart; now a few dangerous and breathless hours made it lie at rest. She had learned that security was not at anyone’s command; bounded by time and chance, it might fail the most peaceable and far-sighted. But safety lay in love, in acceptance, in eternity.
And laughter touched their fellowship again, like the wheeling flight of a swallow, swooping on the most unlikely occasions for it – as when they spoke of the Covenanters’ destruction of one of Montrose’s beautiful castles, that had never yet been sung, as had the fate of the Bonny House of Airlie – and Magdalen demanded what poet, however rude and local, could find rhyme or poetic reason for lament in such a name as the Bonny House of Mugdock?
It was now the dead of the year, cold, tempestuous and stormy, in the early days of December, dark with cloud, when the flat fields lay sad and sodden below Kinnaird, and the seagulls cried harshly over the wet purple of ploughed lands after rain, and the wind hurled through the thin orchards, and apples were stacked in rosy pyramids in the barns, and Lady Cunningham, ‘We must make some apple cheese for Lady Anne Cunningham, for her teeth are all going, and she can eat nothing solid, and detests such slops as porridge and bread-and-milk.’
‘Though I’d never trust Annie not to bite,’ said Lord Southesk, and the two old people had laughed with friendly malice, as Magdalen now laughed with Jamie.
She was jealous, she said, of a certain Captain Francis Dalziel who had enlisted a small company of horse in Carnwath’s troop under Montrose that spring, with a black banner at their head that showed a naked man hanging on a gibbet, and the motto, ‘I dare.’ Captain Dalziel’s real name was Mrs Pierson, and nobody knew why she had thus appeared, dressed, and fought as a man.
‘You have a very tame wife, Jamie. Why cannot I too follow you to the wars, armed to the teeth?’
‘Mrs Pierson’s teeth were part of her armour – they stuck out.’
‘How thoughtful to tell me that! And you will love me although I do not fight by your side?’
‘I love you all the more that you do not care on which side I fight nor who wins, as long as those you love are safe.’
It was true, for he needed that very contrast to the wild flights of his adventures, and the emotions that he aroused in others. His hero-worshipping nieces could not give him the repose that he craved in Magdalen. Her adoration of him, devoid of the wild glamour that it had for others, was like a cooling drink after so much wine of adulation. His greatest comfort lay in the faint, sceptical touch of her voice, in her deliberately ordinary attitude to life, when he was in the midst of leading his Homeric allies through a campaign as preposterous as their own sagas, a campaign that a boy like his son might well wish would last his lifetime. But he himself was not a boy, not even primarily a romantic.
That was the secret of his hold on the heroes and ruffians he led, whose pride it was to rush blindly into fight – that he himself never lost the coolness of his judgement, that it was his reason that flamed white-hot in action, prompted his most daring commands, turned disaster into victory by a rapid calculation, a deliberate word flung at the critical moment into the fight, which acted like wine and fire.
Johnnie told his mother of his new friends’ berserk deeds, unhindered by their wounds; and she was only reminded that his father had been ill and had cheated her, for she had not been there to nurse him.
‘He cheated his enemies worse, then,’ cried Johnnie, and told proudly how his ‘good news’ had stung his father to recovery, ‘so that he sprang up and frightened them much more than he had done before.’
She looked from her husband to her son, grown so much taller even since she had last seen him. Their bodies were hardened, supple as steel, not an ounce of them but played its part as a perfect fighting weapon. Three months had metamorphosed Johnnie from a schoolboy to a splendid young cavalier, brown and lean and full of terrible stories – yet still the child peeped out in his pride in the jokes he had with the Irish soldiers, who delighted to make half a plaything, half an idol of their commander’s son.
It was the child in him that tore her heart as he left her again; it was the grown cavalier (at fourteen) that tantalized young James with cruel envy, as Johnnie rode off beside his father, with a swaggering air and a wave of his hand in gay farewell to the women and children and the old grandfather and tutor, all standing on the steps of the castle to watch that little group of dark figures riding over the plain towards a torn rift of fire and white light in the stormy evening sky.
The streak of sunset showed the distant hills. Magdalen had seen Jamie ride off into them ever since she had been a child; never had she done so without wondering when she would see him come back. He belonged to the hills, and she to the plains.
Her mother and father were trying to distract her attention with little kind comforting remarks. But she did not answer them; she turned to Master Forrett, and said, ‘Did you not say the mountains were once as flat as this plain?’
‘Before God raised them,’ he replied.
‘Yes, the God in their hearts, the fire that burned there and would not let them rest.’
‘Come indoors, my lamb,’ said her mother, ‘one cannot see them any more now.’
‘Where is James?’ she asked.
James had gone indoors already. He could not bear it, he would wave his handkerchief no longer, but crept away from the little group on the castle steps, and was discovered later by Magdalen in the cubby-hole under the stairs, where they kept his and Johnnie’s guns and rods and fishing tackle.
She looked in with a rushlight in her hand, and there he sat sniffing in the dark, because he had ridden away with Johnnie last time, and why could he not do so now?
‘You will ride away too in your time
,’ Magdalen told him. ‘Stay with me now for a little.’
He put up a sticky, rather damp hand, for he had been rubbing his eyes, and touched her cheek.
‘You are crying,’ he said, as accusingly as though he were innocent of it. ‘Don’t do that. Sit down, and I will tell you a story.’
The hanging game-bags and landing-nets made an uninviting harbour. James seemed to have a liking for such impersonal places. Once he had told her something she knew, but dreaded to hear, among the shelves of white sheets in the linen room at Kincardine, while the snow had fallen slowly outside the little window. Something about King Charles – and about Jamie – but she did not want to remember.
‘Come up to my room, and tell me the story there,’ she said.
They went upstairs and sat by the fire and toasted their hands and noses while their heels and backs remained chilly. They watched the logs crackling and sparkling across the red-hot sods of peat that smouldered into furry ash, grey-white as the fur of the little mountain foxes in winter.
Up in the huge chimney, a wind moaned and whistled and caught the wood-smoke; now blew it back with showers of ash into their laps and faces, making their eyes smart; now whirled it upwards with a sputter of red sparks.
It would be bitter cold on the moor tonight. Montrose and his men travelled now so light, they encumbered themselves with tents no more than cannon. When they stole marches over the mountains, they dared light no fires.
Johnnie had said he slept as snug as a bug in a rug, rolled deep in the heather in a nest of men lying close for warmth, with their wide plaids unwound and swaddled round them.
But how would they keep alive when the great gales tore across the bare mountain side and swept the snow into the hollows, in drifts deep and wide enough to bury the men as they lay asleep?
How should Johnnie keep alive in weather fit to perish the crows?
‘You are not listening to my story,’ said James.
The Proud Servant Page 37