Eh—ha ha, ha!'
'Dem husbands—I hate them all.'
'Talking of the Brigade, have you heard of Jernyngham of your battalion lately?'
'He was well cleaned out before he—aw—disappeared from London; but don't know him now, poor devil.'
'It was at this "poor devil's" table you spent some of your happiest hours,' said Clavering, reproachfully. There was a pause, during which I turned towards the door, sick of this empty conversation, and impatient to see the baronet. After the learned Mac Fee had delivered himself for the tenth time of some stereotyped remarks on the heat of the weather, and the excellence of the wine, Mr. Snobleigh observed with his most languid air.
'I am tired of this kind of thing, and must go back to town. Horrid slow here in the 'Ighlands—and—aw—slow fellows all round about. Laura Everingham is chawming, no doubt; and—aw—your sister, Clavering, imparts quite a London air to the whole place; but I—aw—still long for Town. One always saves something, however, in this bawbawous wegion—beg pardon, Mr. Mac Fee, but—aw—aw—'tis so. Had Jernyngham been here, his stud had never been pounded at Tattersall's—his commission at Greenwood's, or his plate by aw—aw—the Lord's chosen people. Now, for instance, in the matter of gloves; in Town, I—aw—I take a walk—and spoil a pair; I take a canter along Rotten Row, or in Hyde Pawk, another pair; dinner, another pair, and for the opera or a ball, another pair, and—aw—aw—so on. And then when one is in debt, as of course everybody is but low scoundrels, the—aw—the saving in many things here is enormous; besides, one aw—acquires the habit of early rising.'
'So the Highlands are not without their advantages?' said I.
'Aw—yes. In London, if not for duty at Kensington or the Tower, I breakfast at one, on coffee and a cigaw; but here I rise at ten appetised like an 'Ighland 'awk—a glass of liqueur—tea, coffee, ham, tongue, game, fowl—aw, aw—dinner ditto; and after knocking about the balls a little, and having adeux tempswith Laura, or a game at guinea points, then a devilled bone and champagne—then to bed at two in the morning—attwo!aw—think of that Clavering—how Gothic—oh—aw—infernally!'
'Now,' said the sheriff, 'what say you to our proposed little game at écarté?'
'Bravo I—aw must have my revenge on Clavering; he walked into me for aw—one thousand two hundred.'
'So much?' exclaimed Mac Fee, aghast.
'Aw yes.'
'I have his little bill for it, at three months, with a promise to renew,' said Clavering, laughing.
'Then what shall we have to-night?'
'Whist—at crown points.'
'No higher?'
'No—I have a thousand pounds on that devilish horse at the Oaks, and must trot easily.'
'Whist be it, then;' and here they rose to adjourn, leaving me confounded by the ease with which they spoke of sums that to my simple Highland comprehension seemed enormous.
'Toodles—aw order some pink champagne and cigars to the card-room.'
'Cigars if you will,' said Clavering; 'but no champagne; dem it, no—I shall drink no more to-night of anything stronger than Father Adam's pale ale, while playing withyou,' and just as they all left the dining-room by one door, I heard the voice of Sir Horace in communication with Snaggs, approaching it by another.
'To-morrow will decide the affair,' said Sir Horace, pausing with his fingers on the crystal door-handle.
'To-morrow or the day after, at latest, my dear sir,' responded the bland voice of Snaggs.
'Of course I am deuced sorry for the old woman, and all that sort of thing—for she must be very unhappy; but we have a great duty to perform—a great duty to society, Mr. Snaggs, and old women must not stand in the way of improvement.'
'To be sure, my dear Sir Horace; "every age," says the divine Blair, will prove burdensome to those who have no fund of happiness in their breast—and as for the young desperado her son, nothing whatever can be made of him.'
'Of course not; his head is filled with such quaint ideas and old Highland stuff, unsuited to modern times, habits, and usages, that he is a mere wild colt, and twice I have been told, pulled out of his stocking,—what do you call it?'
'Skene Dhu, or Black Knife, my dear sir,' suggested Mr. Snaggs.
'Ah yea—a skin doo, upon you, sir. I know not why these Highland fellows are allowed to bristle about with their daggers and skenes, when there are laws passed against the wearing of arms. But the truth is, the sooner that this young fellow and his people are sent off to America by theSutherland, under Captain Sellars, the better. There are some fine swamps to drain, moors to cultivate, and woods to cut down in the Cunadas; and as for that great ruffian Cullum Dhu, who nearly murdered poor Toodles the other day—dem the fellow, I'll have him transported! Adversity teaches these fierce spirits no lesson.'
'True, my dear Sir Horace,' chimed in the moralist; '"adversity," exclaims the divine Blair, "how blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver, compared with those of guilt!"'
'Dem Blair—I am quite sick of him, too; but let us have a glass of Moselle, and then we'll join the ladies in the drawing-room.Youhere, Mr. Mac Innon!' he exclaimed, with angry surprise on seeing me; 'how do ye do, sir,' he added, with a dark countenance; 'my friend Mr. Snaggs and I have just closed a long conversation about you.'
'I am sorry to hear it, Sir Horace, for now I fear my visit here is bootless.'
'You judge most correctly, if you have come to ask delay about my projected clearances.'
There was a glare in the sharp eye, and a smile on the thin lips of Snaggs, as Sir Horace said this. I felt my eyes flash fire as anger gathered in my heart; for heaven never intended me either for a temporiser or a diplomatist.
'I was about to speak to you, Sir Horace, not of myself, but of my mother, who is aged, sickly, infirm, and unable to comprehend how any power on earth possesses a law to expel her from Glen Ora.'
'Now, young man, you irritate me! This is the rock upon which all you Celts split your very obtuse heads. The good lady, your mother, with the rest of the people on that portion of my estate, must learn that the tenant has no right in the soil.'
'None whatever, legally or morally,' added Snaggs.
'Yourproperty!' I replied, trembling with passion; 'it would have been as much as your head is worth to have said this to a Mac Innon on the spot where you stand, a hundred years—ay fifty years ago. But it is of my mother I would speak—'
'Nay, sir—excuse me—I will hear nothing; moreover, your presence here is an unwarrantable intrusion; the ladies, Mr. Snaggs, await us at coffee.'
'Oh for a curse upon him whose mad extravagance and folly brought my father's son to this humiliation!'
From the illuminated marble vestibule, I plunged out into the darkness of the night, and goaded by my fierce and terrible thoughts, was rushing down the avenue, when in my confusion I stumbled against a marble Psyche, that stood in the centre of the carriage-way, about a pistol-shot from the door, and fell, stunned and almost breathless beside the pedestal.
I thought of my feeble mother about to be torn from the roof that had sheltered her so long; I thought of my brave father now beneath the sod, and of his fathers in that old ancestral burial-place, where 'shaded by sepulchral yew,' lay the warriors and the patriarchs of our tribe, and where I would never lie; I thought of all that had been, but could never be again; the stirring past, with all its shadowy glory; the humiliating present with all its bitterness; the dark and dubious future with all its doubts and fears; and a storm—a devouring fever—raged within me!
Placing my hands upon my temples, I pressed my hot and throbbing brow upon the cold marble pedestal, and endeavoured to reflect and to breathe.
The three windows of the drawing-room, which in the French fashion, were constructed to open down to the Portsoy marble steps that descended to the lawn, were all unclosed, as the heat of the atmosphere was great, and the luxury, lights, and music within made me scan for a moment this magnificent apartment from the place where I lingered. It was crowded by objects ofvirtû, and the subdued lights of the crystal chandeliers, and chaste girondoles, fell on antique Sevrès and China vases; on oriental jars and Dresden china plateaux; on the Warwick vase in verde antique; on velvet hangings draperied up with gold; on Dianas and Apollos, &c.; on Rosso de Lavanti marble pillars; on bronzes and Medician vases, glittering antique buhl and or-molu tables, and all that might please the eye, or gratify the whim of a moment.
The notes of a piano—one of Errard's best—and the voice of a female singing, came towards me, and I raised myself from the ground on my elbow to listen. My heart beat wildly. The air was soft and sad and touching; and—though then unknown to me—it was the divineSpirito Gentilfrom the opera of Donizetti. She who sang was Laura, and my ears drank in every gentle note; the fierce conflict of pride and passion died away within me; my heart was melted by the gentler emotions that Laura's influence roused, and I could have wept—but not a tear would come.
I could see her figure, with Clavering standing beside her, patting time with his gloved hand, and turning over the leaves of the address to Leonora. I wished him any place but there.
Laura looked charming!
From the crystal girandoles that stood on the little carved brackets of the piano, the light fell in bright rays over her black silk dress, which, in its darkness, contrasted strongly with the pure whiteness of her beautiful neck and delicate hands. Her face was full of sweetness and animation, and her soft voice so delightfully modulated, was full of an enthusiasm that lent her usually pale cheek a flush, as she sang that winning Italian air with all its requisite pathos.
'Aw—vewy well—she does sing diwinely!' said a voice near me. 'Alboni—even little Piccolomini herself, could not surpass her.'
'Hush—pray,' said another.
'Aw—now it is ended—bravo!'
Close by me were Mr. Mac Fee the sheriff, and Mr. Snobleigh, smoking each a choice cuba, and hovering so near the marble Psyche, that I dared not move, lest I should be observed and suspected of eaves-dropping.
'A dooced bad cigaw,' said Snobleigh, endeavouring to light a refractory cabana, and swaying about in a manner that sufficiently indicated how the fumes of the champagne had mounted into that vacuum where his brains should have been; 'dem—I think your 'Ighland air spoils them; and aw—aw—you admire Laura—eh; aw—now it draws; a fine girl—say yes—why the devil don't you say yes?'
'Beautiful—and you are tender in that quarter?' simpered the servile Mac Fee.
'Aw—yes, and have some devilish serious thoughts of matrimony, too.'
'Marriage is a serious thing, Mr. Snobleigh.'
'Aw—yes—demmed serious when one marries age, ugliness, or aw—poverty; but with, with a charming young person like Miss Everingham—it alters the case entirely. But don't you observe, old fellow, that Laura talks too much of that aw—aw—peculiar individual—that species of outlaw, as Mr. Snaggs names him—'
'Young Mac Innon?'
'Dem! yes—but to teaze me of course. What is that now? Fanny Clavering at her aw—aw—everlasting song—
"I dare not seek to offer theeA timid love like mine—"
'Like hers indeed—aw—aw—ha! ha! it has been offered to half the fellows in the Household Brigade. Curse that pink champagne—it makes one so devilish shaky in the aw—legs. Yes—Laura has talked so much about this 'Ighland colt, Mac Innon, ever since the shooting-match, that I—aw don't half like it. In fact, Clavering—a good judge of both horses and aw—women—swears that she loves him.'
'You cannot be serious?'
'Aw—yes, frightfully serious. But only think of a girl like Laura troubling her—aw head about such a wild Highland Sawney Bean? I should like to see him handling my yacht, theBruiser, in a stiff nor'-easter off Cowes; taking the mettle out of a four-in-hand team; aw—making up his book on the Derby; widing the winnaw at the Oaks; knocking the balls about at billiards, or aw—aw—getting a child of Judah to fork out the tip, or achieving anything else that savours of town life, or of civilization. The chawming Laura in love with him indeed; 'pon my soul the idea is—aw too absawd!'
'Absurd, indeed,' chorused Mr. Mac Fee.
'Absawd—my dear fellow, absawd!' added Snobleigh, as he staggered away, followed by the obsequious Mac Fee.
Laura spoke of me frequently, and Clavering thought she loved me!
Loved me—could it be credible, or was it the mere jest of a heedless heart, that linked our names together—a linking that, in love, has a nameless charm to the young, the timid, the tender, and the true. What a tumult was raised in my breast by this casual revelation! I scarcely dared to breathe. If aught was wanting to increase the bitterness of the struggle waged by pride and love within me, it was the words of the thoughtless Snobleigh.
But these bright hopes of a vague and joyous future—and all their train of burning thoughts and ardent aspirations, were doomed to be crushed and forgotten for a time, by the terrible tidings awaiting me at my desolate home.
Midnight was close at hand, when, turning away from this abode of luxury and splendour, where every comfort that wealth can procure surrounded the cold and selfish Sir Horace and his pampered household, I bent my steps towards the mountains, and by a narrow path through a dark and moonless copsewood—or rather, an old primeval forest of the Middle Ages, I hastened towards Glen Ora.
I had much to reflect on, and above all the flood of bitter and anxious thoughts that rolled like a dark and tempestuous sea around me, I saw the image of Laura Everingham; for, boy like, and full of mountain poetry, legendary lore, and old enthusiasm, to me she naturally became a goddess, and the guiding-star of all my hopes and aspirations; while serving to temper with something of reason the fiery anger with which I was tempted to regard the cruelty and harshness of her father; who, like too many of our new Highland proprietors, was but the slave of mammon and the tool of a cunning factor.
While threading my way—somewhat hastily I confess—through a deep and savage cairn, which was terrible of old as the shade of a mysterious spirit—a rushing sound, a crashing of branches struck my ear, and something white passed near me, like a sunbeam, or a flash of fire.
'The white stag!' I exclaimed, in a breathless voice, and involuntarily grasped my dirk, while the perspiration started to my brow; for by an old tradition in the glen, it was affirmed, that whenever danger was near the race of Mac Innon, awhite stagcrossed the Braes of Loch Ora.
'My mother! my mother!' was my next thought, and like a mountain deer, I sprang away to reach the old jointure-house of our family.
Dawn was stealing across the dun slopes of Ben Ora and the grey rocky scalps of the Craig-na-tuirc, when I reached the crest of a hill which overhung my mother's residence; and there I paused to draw breath, and to survey a scene which, though familiar to me as the features of my own face, never lost the charm of its lonely beauty.
Diminished by distance, the little thatched cottages in the glen seemed less than molehills, but green and silent, dotting the slope far down below, while above them rose the stupendous mountains piled up, crest on crest, to heaven. From the humble roofs, the smoke was beginning to ascend in long spiral columns into the clear and ambient air, as the poor, but thrifty housewives of the glen prepared their fires of guisse-monaye—the bogwood and black peat.
In this vast Highland solitude where I paused the breeze bore to the ear no sound of domestic life; no sheep bleated, as of old, on the green hill side; no horse neighed or cow lowed in the ample glen beneath, for the poor cottagers had long since parted with all for sustenance; but there rang the ceaseless rush of the torrent, which plashed and glittered as it tore through the corrie; the whirr of the plover, the hum of the heather-bee, or the distant roar of the rutting hind, as he rose from his dewy lair among the feathery bracken beside yonder old grey battle-cairn. Even these sounds were faint or undefined, and all nature seemed as motionless and still, as the stately stag with giant horns, that stood on a pinnacle of rock, against the rosy flush of the eastern sky. He seemed to be surveying the scene; then he moved his lofty antlers, and lo! between me and the gorgeous blaze of light that overspread the east, and threw out in black relief the sharp jagged outline of the rocky hill, there rose a forest of branching antlers, as, in obedience to their king, a noble herd of deer, calves, hinds, and harts, three thousand head and more, stood for a minute as if to show their whole array, and then with slow and measured steps, descended and wound down the mountain side, until they disappeared among the sandy ravines and bushy corries which the streams and storms of ages have torn and riven in the bosom of Ben Ora.
There had been a great stalking expedition in the forests of the West, and the gillies of the Marquis of Drumalbane had been driving the deer for many miles along the shore; hence the collection of this vast herd, but amidst its masses I could discern no trace of awhitestag. Then, whence the vision of last night? Was this animal indeed supernatural, and the harbinger of evil, as tradition affirmed it to be?
My gloomy forebodings increased as the brilliance of morning descended from the mountain slopes into the deep and dreamy glens, and as I hastened down the narrow path which led to my mother's house. No smoke was wreathing upward from its chimneys, and there was an aspect of still life about it which surprised and alarmed me. The door was wide open—an unusual circumstance. Anon, I saw a number of persons hastening to and fro between the cottages of the glen, and a little crowd of men and women gradually collected round the house. A deadly terror smote my heart, and every pulse stood still. Then my ears tingled, as a cry of lamentation woke the silent echoes of the valley. I sprang down the mountain side, rushed through the startled clachan, and at the door of the house met old Mhari, her eyes red with weeping. She threw her arms round me.
'My mother?' I exclaimed.
'She is dying!' replied the sobbing woman, in her own figurative language; 'she must soon be laid in the Place of Sleep, with her feet to the rising sun.'
'Dying!' I ejaculated.
'Why protract the poor lad's misery?' said a gentleman, who wore a suit of accurate black, with a white neckcloth, and silver spectacles, and whom I knew to be the doctor of the district, and a great enemy of old Mhari, for whose universal specific for all complaints (wild garlic boiled with May butter) he had a great contempt; 'why add to what he must suffer?—tell him at once, that he may bear his loss like a Christian and a man. Mac Innon, your mother is dead—God help you, my poor fellow!'
It was so—dead—and now I had not a relation, not a friend in the world, but the poor people of the glen, to whom I was bound by the common ties of clanship and descent. On learning that I had gone to visit Sir Horace, and knowing well my fiery temper and proud disposition, my mother's gentle breast had been filled by a hundred tender anxieties and thoughts of danger. Finding herself alone for a little space, animated by what purpose heaven only knows—perhaps by a restless desire to breathe the fresh air of the glen for the last time; perhaps to look for me, or perhaps to test the worth of the old tradition, and so rid herself of a life that had become a burden; inspired by some mysterious impulse, and endued thereby with more than her wonted strength of thought and purpose, she had robed herself in a plaid and wrapper, and left her bed unseen, for she was found dead—dead on the rustic seat beside the porch, and consequentlybeyondthe walls of the jointure-house. Here she was found by Callum Dhu, on his returning with our doctor, a dapper little country practitioner, whose attempts to restore animation proved utterly unavailing.
'Dhia! Dhia!' was the exclamation of Callum; 'assuredly the curse of the Red Priest is here!'
'Curse of—what do you say, my good man?' asked the doctor, with a cross air of perplexity; 'it is the result of an inward complaint under which she long laboured. She was highly susceptible—nervous—sickly and sensitive—I was always quite prepared for this fatal termination.'
'But you never said so till now,' retorted Callum; 'so what avails your skill. Had she only keptwithinthe door she might have lived long enough.'
I now felt myself above the reach of further misfortune. I had been the mark of Fate's sharpest arrows, and a proud but fierce emotion of defiance swelled within me for a time. Even Snaggs and the coming terrors of the eviction were forgotten now. Thus I felt buoyed up, as it were, by a courage gathered from the very depth of my despair; but anon, the sense of loneliness that fell upon me was crushing and profound.
She who for years had watched over me, as only a mother watches over the last of her little brood; she who in age I had tended, nursed, and consoled, with a love, like her own, the most unselfish and unwearied, had died at last, when I was absent, and when none was near to close her eyes—to kiss her pallid lip.
'It is a warning!' exclaimed her old nurse Mhari. 'The men of Glentuirc are gone—those of Glen Ora must soon follow. Surd air Suinard! chaidh Ardnamorchuan a doluidh!'[*]
[*] "Prepare Sainard, for Ardnamorchuan is gone to wreck!" a proverb.
Then came the funeral—all, all a dream to me.
The night had been dark and stormy, and in Glen Ora the keening of the women, and the howling of the dogs, 'who knew that death was nigh,' mingled with the wail of the bagpipe and the soughing of the wind; and, like a dream, I see before me still the apartment hung with white, and all its furniture shrouded in the same cold, dreary, livery; the coffin lid bearing a vessel which contained a little salt, and all the doors left wide open, to give free passage to the departing spirit, which old superstition still averred was hovering near its earthly tenement; the low-moaned songs, or the deep and earnest lamentations of Mhari, Minnie, and other women of the glen; the cold, stiff, and conventional prayer by the parish minister; the wine and whisky, cake and cheese served round before 'the lifting,' and the slow, solemn march ofGil Chroisd(the servant of Christ), which Ewen Oig and Gillespie Ruadh wailed forth on their great mountain-pipes, as they headed the funeral procession, which departed about sunrise for the burial-place of our tribe.
The morning dawned on murky clouds of red and amber hue, piled in masses above Ben Ora, around whose rocky crest the ascending mist was wreathed like a mighty cymar. The sun arose, but gloomy, pale, and watery; and, to me, all nature seemed to wear the livery of gloom and woe.
The day was as dreary as our errand was mournful, and slowly the procession, which was formed by the whole male population of the glen, in number about a hundred men and boys, the aged supporting themselves on their staffs, and leading their grandchildren by the hand, wound over the hills, communing together on the virtues of the deceased, and of that olden time, to which a falling people ever look fondly back, as a faded woman to the days of her beauty—as the aged to the days of their youth.
All the funeral arrangements were conducted in the modern, rather than the ancient, Highland fashion. Old Sergeant Ian Mac Raonuil, who had served with my father in the Black Watch, had the charge of marshalling the procession, and at certain distances on the road he regularly cried 'halt-relief,' when four fresh men hastened forward to bear the coffin, which was carried for four miles on the shoulders of our people, until we reached the place of interment, on the shore of a great salt loch, or arm of the sea.
The day was still lowering; the sounding sea of the stormy Hebrides dashed its waves on the echoing beach; the eternal mist, like a mighty shroud, rolled along the drenched hills and dripping heather; and through it, as through a veil, the joyless sun, shorn of his rays, seemed at times to hang in mid air, like an obscured lamp. Our hearts were heavy indeed. Even the Lowland Scots are peculiarly liable to be impressed by the appearance of nature at all times; then, at such a time of sorrow and foreboding, how much more so were we, who were bred among the stupendous scenery of the North, and by our race and habits were the creatures of strong and gloomy imaginations! And then the slow, sad, and wailing march ofGil Chroisd; how mournfully it rang between the silent mountains, and woke the echoes of that lonely shore, where the long-legged heron, or the gigantic sea-horse, were brooding on the slippery rocks, and where the wiry Scottish pines cast their shadow on the breakers!
At a place named Coil-chro, or the Wood-of-hazel-nuts, a turn of the path, as it wound over the headland, brought us in view of a gentleman and two ladies on horseback, attended by a smart mounted servant, clad in a grey surtout, and accoutred with a leather girdle, laced hat, and black cockade. The gentleman dismounted, and with much politeness and good feeling, in imitation of the local custom, remained on foot with head uncovered while the procession passed by. At a glance I recognized Captain Clavering in this polite stranger, and under the broad hats of the ladies the soft features of his bright-eyed sister and the gentle Miss Everingham. It was at this moment that old Mac Raonuil cried 'halt-relief!' and while a change took place in the bearers, Laura, whose eyes were full of tears, brought her horse close to me, and holding out her gloved hand, pressed and patted mine with great frankness and kindly sympathy.
'Heaven help you, poor Mr. Mac Innon,' she said; 'we all deplore your bereavement, and feel only remorse and shame for the severity with which my angry papa——but what canIdo?'
I kissed her hand, and she did not withdraw it; while the beautiful expression that filled her eyes, to which her half-drooping lids lent a wonderful sweetness, made my heart swell with tenderness and gratitude; for human sympathy was doubly valuable, and hers was doubly dear to me at a time so terrible; but again the shrill notes of the wild pipe struck up—again the solemn procession went forward, and a turn of the road hid Laura from my view—yet her eyes seemed before me still, and her voice was lingering in my car.
A half mile further on brought us to the ancient burial-ground; it was circular and surrounded by a low ruined wall of rough dry stones, as it had once been a Druidical circle. Here the grass grew with peculiar richness and rankness, for the dead of more than two thousand years lay there. Old stones, graven with quaint runes, lay half sunk, amid the moss and nettles, like the Celtic cross that marked where the Christianized Scot had laid his dust in the same grave with his pagan fathers, who had worshipped the God of Day and the Spirit of Loda. Close by stood an old chapel of the Kuldei, dedicated to St. Colme, the Abbot of Iona. It had been a ruin since the Spaniards, under the loyal and noble Marquis of Tullibardine, had landed in Glensheil, and fought the Government troops early in the last century; but a vaulted corner of this venerable fane was still used as a chapel by the poor Catholic Gael of the district. Here a rough deal table served them for an altar; a rough crucifix, and six candles, in clay holders, stood thereon, with a few garlands of freshly-gathered wild flowers, while heather was spread before it for those who chose to kneel. Near it was a miserable hut, or wigwam, where Father Raoul Beg Mac Donuil (i.e., Little Father Ronald, the son of Donald), a priest from the Scottish College at Valladolid, dwelt in prayer, penury, and misery; for among the poor clansmen of the impoverished and almost desolate West, the labours of the Catholic clergy are indeed the labour of love and self-denial.
Three Mac Innons had been Abbots of Iona, and one of them built this chapel. In ancient times, when one of the house of Glen Ora died, a grave was found in the morning ready dug; but by whose hands no mortal knew—for none had ever dared to watch so said old tradition; but even this mysterious sexton had left the country, unable perhaps, as Callum Dhu affirmed, to breathe the air that was infected by factors, gangers, and rural police.
Before entering the burying-ground we performed the deasuil, and went round itwith the sun. The people insisted on this, and I had no wish or will but theirs; besides, the Celt is a great stickler for ancient customs. The parish minister permitted Father Raoul to say a prayer at the grave, for she who was gone had ever been kind to him, as a priest of that faith in which her forefathers had lived and died; and it is a noble feature in the Highland character, that neither priestcraft, rancour, nor bigotry could ever warp or sever the kindly ties of blood and clanship.
The Place of Sleep, or, as some still named it as in the Druid days, The Place of the Stones, was one of those old yew-shaded graveyards which still remain in many a desolate glen, to mark where our expatriated people were wont to lay their dead. Here we lowered her into the narrow house.
A little shovelling, a little batting of sods, every stroke on which went home to my aching heart, an uncovering of heads—a little time, and all was over. I felt more than ever alone in the world—for a recollection was all that remained to me of my mother—my last relative on this side of that remorseless grave.
The minister patted me on the shoulder—the old priest shook me kindly by the hand, and led me away. In vain did they tell me, in hackneyed phrase, that those whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth; my rebellious spirit spurned the stereotyped idea. I felt myself a beggar and a lonely outcast—that all was over now, that every human tie which bound me to my home (but had I now a home?) was torn asunder for ever!
Omens of evil, such as serve to feed the superstitious mind, and to make a deep impression on a people so filled with poetry and wild fancies as our unlettered Gael, had not been wanting, as forerunners of these calamities; and these omens had been duly remarked by the aged dwellers in our glen, as the sure forerunners of direful events.
In the preceding winter, when the country was covered by snow, Gillespie Ruadh and others averred, that early one morning they discovered marks of the feet or talons of a gigantic bird, each impression being at least twenty yards apart. These tremendous footmarks were traced across the glen, and over Ben Ora, from the loch to the sea shore, where all trace of them was lost in the flowing tide. On hearing of this marvel, I hurried to the spot, but a fresh fall of snow had obliterated these strange marks, which were declared to indicate a departure of our people towards the western sea.
Moreover of late, the white stag had been frequently seen, and had even ventured to approach the lights in our cottage windows.
This animal, which the most expert of our foresters had failed to slay, was a tall, powerful, and gigantic stag, with antlers of remarkable size and beauty—royal antlers—i.e.having three points on each horn. These proud appendages itnevercast; at least none had ever been found. According to the unvarying story of the hunters, stalkers, and keepers, it was known to have been in existence for more than two hundred and fifty years; for Lachlan Mohr's father, Torquil Mac Innon, who was slain by an arrow at the battle of Benrinnes (excuse this antiquarianism, good reader, but your Welshmen, Celts and Irishmen, are full of such old memories), wounded it in the right ear, the half of which he shot away. Thereafter a fleet and fierce, but stately white stag, minus an ear, had roved, and was now affirmed to be roving, in the woods of Glen Ora.
If this was indeed the same that Torquil covered with his long Spanish arquebus, it must have rivalled those of Juvenal, or the hawks of Ælian, which lived for seven hundred years. Be this as it may, if on the shores of Lochtreig there was a white stag which never died, why should there not be another on the shores of Loch Ora? this was deemed unanswerable.
The swift white stag which now haunted the woods of the Mac Innons was certainly (as I had often seen by my telescope) minus the ear which tradition alleged old Torquil shot away; and this miraculous animal was affirmed to be the same which had passed the tent of Lachlan in the night before he was slain at Worcester, and which appeared before the calamities of Culloden. It had been visible often of late, and the poor unlettered Gael of the glen spoke of it in whispers one to another as a certain warning of the total ruin about to overtake them.
Whispering of these things, the men of the glen recrossed the mountains, but slowly and silently, for the voice of the pipe was heard no more on the gloomy heath; the boom of the climbing waves had died away on the distant beach, and evening was reddening the dun heathy slopes of the Ben when we drew near our home, and a cry of alarm burst from those who were in front of our funeral party. Large columns of smoke were seen to ascend from the hollow, and to curl in the clear air between us and the sky.
A chill came over the hearts of those who accompanied me. As for myself, I deemed, as I have said, that misfortune had shot the sharpest shafts at me, and now that I had nothing more in this world to care for, or to fear; but yet I felt a sore pang, when, on arriving at a gorge of the hills, rightly named Gar-choine, or The Place of Lamentation, for there the Campbells had once defeated the Mac Innons, we came in sight of the beautiful natural amphitheatre of Glen Ora, and saw thirty columns of smoke ascending from as many cottages, and uniting in one broad and heavy cloud of vapour, that rolled like mist along the mountain sides. On the slope of the hill were clustered a crowd of women and children, screaming and lamenting, while at the far extremity of the glen, where the narrow and winding road that led to Inverness dipped down towards the Caledonian Canal, we perceived a train of carts laden with furniture—the miserable household gear of our poor cotters; while the bayonets of a party of soldiers who escorted it—like a Spanish treasure or a Roman triumph—flashed a farewell ray in the setting sun, for resistance had been anticipated by Mr. Ephraim Snaggs; and thus he had borrowed an unwilling party from the detachment which usually garrisons the secluded barrack at Fort William.
The glensmen paused on the brow of the hill which overlooked their desecrated homes, and their voices rose with their clenched hands in one heavy and terrible imprecation; then with a shout they rushed down towards their wives and little ones, where a fresh scene of grief and sorrow awaited them; for now we were homeless, and 'landless, landless,' as ever were the race of Alpine in the last century.
Snaggs and the Sheriff had taken their measures well to evict the people, destroy their dwellings, and seize the furniture when no resistance could be offered; by choosing a time when all the men of the glen were absent at my mother's interment. Yet they took nearly as many precautions before venturing up the side of the Loch Ora, as if the clans were still in their most palmy days, when Lachlan Mohr feasted his brave men on the best beeves of the Campbells, and had five hundred targets, and as many claymores, hung in his hall.
The barbarous cruelties exercised by a neighbouring Duchess and a canting Marquis upon the poor, had so greatly exasperated the Mac Innons, that at fairs and elsewhere, they had been in the habit of openly threatening an armed resistance to any attempt to evict them from the glen, where they—the aboriginal race—had dwelt for ages before Laird or Peer or feudal parchments had a name in the land. Callum's character and mine were well known to be reckless, bold, and even desperate; thus Messieurs Snaggs and Mac Fee took their measures wisely, and accordingly selected the time for attack, when the whole of the male population were at the grave of the Mac Innons.
The rural police of the adjacent districts were secretly ordered to hold tryst in a wood about six miles distant. There they arrived about midnight, and received a harangue from Sheriff Mac Fee on the majesty of the law; there an oath was administered to them, and there Mr. Snaggs quoted Blair, and gave them that which proved much more acceptable—a jorum of whisky and ale. On mustering their forces, these worthy officials found that, including themselves, the Procurator Fiscal and a couple of clerks, with the police, they had only thirty men, but as well armed with hatchets, crow-bars, levers and pickaxes, as if they were about to invest the Redan. Doubtful still of success, application had been made to the Commandant at Fort William for a Serjeant's party of twelve men from the Irish Fusileers, with twenty rounds of ball-cartridge each, as there was a fear that the same rifles which had done such wonders at the recent Gathering, might cover the legal person of the great moralist. Thus the wholepossémarched in array of battle into the glen, where, to the terror and dismay of the women, they appeared about half an hour after the last of the funeral procession had disappeared over the summit of the hill.
An immediate and indiscriminate attack was made upon the cottages and on the old jointure-house; and amid the shrieks, outcries, tears and lamentations of the women, the usual work of eviction and destruction progressed with as much spirit as if Huske, Hawley, Cumberland and Co., had left the infernal shades to visit upper air. Delay and mercy were craved alike in vain by these poor people. In vain did more than one young mother hold her new-born babe aloft; in vain did the daughters of those who fought with Moore and Wellington, implore pity, on bended knees, with clasped hands and streaming eyes, as they clung about the knees of Snaggs and Mac Fee; but each was "sullen as Ajax," and bent on upholding the dignity of the law and of wealth. The inmates were summoned to come forth, and if they refused, were roughly dragged out, some with babes at their breasts, and batoned with such brutality, that the Irish Fusileers, whose hearts revolted at the police, and who in their own land had seen too much of similar work, used the butts of their muskets against the limbs of the law, and thus offered some protection to our women.
Every article of furniture was flung out; box-beds were torn down; chairs, tables, kail-pots, and kettles, spinning-wheels, caups, quaighs and luggies, clothing and delft, were thrown on the sward, and in many instances destroyed in a spirit of sheer recklessness. Every little object which time, tenderness, or association made valuable in the humble eyes of the cottagers was demolished or carried off. The domestic shrine was rifled; itslaresdesecrated—its household gods destroyed. Everything eatable or drinkable was at once appropriated by the plunderers. The thatch was torn down; crow-bars and levers were applied to the huge boulder-stones, which in many instances formed the corners of the poor huts, and by one or two wrenches, the whole fabric was tumbled in a heap of ruin. The cabers and couples were cut through by saws or axes; and thus every hut, house, barn, stable, and hen-roost were destroyed. The old jointure-house was gutted of its furniture, every vestige of which was piled on carts with the miserable chattels of the people, and driven off towards the nearest market-town; not an article of my property escaped, save a few old seals and rings, which, with my father's sword, old Mhari and Minnie concealed about their persons. Then the mansion was unroofed; the doors hewn down; the windows dashed out; and the floors torn up and burned, to render it totally uninhabitable. Thus from house to house, from cot to cot, and from barn to byre, went these ministers of destruction; the sick were dragged from their beds; the aged mother of Alisdair Mac Gouran, a woman in her ninetieth year, and whose grey head had not left her pillow for three years, was borne out and flung on the damp hill side. Women scarcely recovered from the pains of maternity—and others on the point of becoming mothers, were alike brought forth, and those who resisted, or vainly attempted to save some prized article, though of little value, were beaten with batons until forced to relinquish their hold.
Seated by her fire, Widow Gillian (the relict of a soldier whose patronymic was Ca-Dearg), and who was the mother of three sons in our Highland Division, boldly refused to come forth, or to yield up her husband's silver medals, of which they endeavoured to deprive her. Rendered desperate and frantic, this woman, though aged, seemed stout and active; she clung, shrieking, to the posts of her bed; but the police tore her away. Then she caught wildly at the jambs of a door; but her fingers were soon bruised or broken by batons, and one constable tired of her screaming, dealt her a blow which fractured her skull, and covered her long grey hair with blood. Then she became insensible. Flora, her daughter, one of the prettiest girls in the glen, when seeking to defend her, received a kick in the breast, from which she never recovered.
Fire was now applied to all the remaining cottages, and their roofs of thatch, turf, and heather, with their old dry rafters of resinous mountain pine, burned bravely. The work of destruction was nearly complete.
Then the sheriff mounted his horse; Snaggs bestrode his trotting garron; the carts laden with such furniture as had not been burned, broken, or deemed worthless, were put in motion; the few sheep and cattle of the people were collected, and accompanied by the constables who were laden with everything they could lay hands upon, and surrounded by the pitying soldiers with their bayonets fixed, Messrs. Fungus Mac Fee, Ephraim Snaggs, and the Fiscal, headed the plunder of the glen, and departed, leaving that once beautiful little mountain-village a heap of smoking ruins—every hut levelled flat, or sinking amid smoke, flame, and dust—the jointure-house reduced to four bare walls; while the women and their little ones, bathed in tears, or covered with cuts, blood, and bruises, remained in a stupor of silent astonishment and horror at this irreparable destruction, which divested them of shelter, of food, furniture, clothing, and everything, and just when the rain-charged clouds of night were descending on the hills.
Let not the English reader deem this atrocious scene overdrawn. In Sutherland, Inverness, and Ross, in Moidart and the Isles, such have been enacted with even greater brutality since the beginning of this century. Yet the brave, hardy, frugal and patient Highlanders have endured it without complaint. In form of law, murders have been committed in open day—but then it was merely the manslaughter of a few Highland paupers, to enforce the dignity of ducal wealth and the majesty of feudal law.
'Thus it is,' says the brave old General Stewart, 'that the love of speculating in the brute creation, has invaded these mountains, into which no foreign enemy could ever penetrate, and has expelled a brave people whom no invader could ever subdue. It has converted whole glens and districts, once the abode of a bold, vigorous, and independent race of men, into scenes of desolation.'
Night came down on that scene of lamentation and woe—on more than eighty human beings who were fashioned in the image of God, and were yet denied such shelter as He accords to the fox and eagle; but though their hearths were desolate, and their old hereditary but humble homes demolished, the clearance could not be deemed complete, until the people were entirely swept away from the country.
Callum and I obtained shelter with the old priest Father Raoul, who afforded us a corner of his little hut; the poor man had but one pallet—and there we remained for a day or two, considering what steps should be taken to find food for those who were starving in the now desolate glen, and moreover to provide for ourselves.
Thus I found a temporary home, within a few feet of the spot, where she, to whom I had ever turned for consolation and comfort, advice and sympathy, was taking her eternal rest.
Meanwhile fresh cruelties and scenes of horror took place in that ill-fated glen, where the people were completely given up to the malevolent fury of Snaggs, who, as a man of the law, had a truly legal aversion to Highlanders.
The evicted formed a little bivouac on the heather. In one place lay a sick mother, stretched on a pallet, covered by her husband's plaid; around her nestled her little ones, gazing with awe and terror at this unusual scene; on the deathlike visage of one parent and the stern despair that lurked in the eyes of the other. Fires of turf and rafters were kindled, and round these, in little booths of rugs and plaids, nestled the younger children, and infants in cradles. Amid these the elder children sported and played, ignorant of the ruin that had come upon them, and in their heedless glee forming a strong contrast to their grief-stricken parents, whose once high spirit was crushed and broken now. Such is the effect of tyranny, starvation, and misrule!
The old soldier, Ian Mac Raonuil, burrowed a hole on the brow of a hill under a rock, and spread his plaid over it. Herein lay his wife, nursing a sickly and delicate child, while he with his stouter sons slept on the sward. The air became chilly, and the cloudy sky was overcharged with dew; thus many who were sick and ailing, wandered about like ghosts on the midnight hill, unable to find either shelter or repose. Premature labour came on the wife of Gillespie Ruadh; and there, on the bleak side of Ben Ora, the wretched Highland mother brought her child into the world. Before morning she expired, and the aged widow Mac Gouran lay also a corpse, not far from her; for before dawn, there came on a tempest of lightning, wind, and rain, as if the very elements had conspired with the petty tyrants of the glen, to destroy the homeless Mac Innons. And while the blue lightning gleamed between the bare scalp of Ben Ora and the rifted brow of the Craig-na-tuirc; while the rain like a ceaseless torrent smoked along the soaking heather, and flooded every rocky chasm and sandy runnel; while the wind swept over the hills as if it would have torn up the heath by the roots, our poor people all nestled together, and, lifting up their voices, sang a psalm with touching piety. Amid this tempest the mother and her youngling died; and the beautiful Celtic superstition—that a woman who dies in childbed, whatever her offences in life—is borne by angels straight to heaven, was remembered now, as the people whispered it to one another, and drew comfort from it.
The sufferings of the night left them more wretched than ever.
To shelter the women, and to veil the dead bodies from the view of the children, a few cabers were propped together, and above these the men spread their plaids and grey frieze coats; but ere long there was a cry of alarm, and the infamous Snaggs, with a party of his levellers and armed constables, came upon them again. Then the coverings were torn off; the cabers flung aside, and the sick and the dead were remorselessly exposed to the blaze of the hot morning sun. The booth which sheltered the children was demolished, and the wife of Mac Raonuil was dragged from her hole on the hill-side.
In vain did she weep and hold up her babe; in vain did the sick veteran, her husband, point to his wounded arm, his silver hairs, and three war-medals; the only reply was fierce abuse for daring to seek shelter, or to burrow, after a notice of removal had been duly served upon them.
A few ducks and hens, which had been wandering and scraping among the ruins of the cottages, were now collected and carried off by the constables, lest they might afford a day's food to the homeless, who were threatened with fresh vengeance by those jacks-in-office, if found in the glen to-morrow. Mr. Snaggs, who always spoke blandly, quoted Scripture and Blair on the folly of resistance; the beauty of submission to the will of God, and more especially of the new proprietor, for 'go they must—a ship was coming round to Loch Ora with sheep; and on the morrow there would arrive several hampers of a new species of game with which Sir Horace meant to stock the glen. Go then, my dear friends,' continued Mr. Snaggs, with a gloating eye at Minnie, who was kneeling over some sick children; 'go, and the Lord will provide for you in Canada—"for," as the divine Blair says, "neither obscurity of station, nor imperfection of knowledge sink below his regard those who obey and worship him."'
With this trite quotation, the elder and the factor whipped up his pony, and departed with a couple of fat ducks dangling at its saddle-bow.
Next morning, the keepers arrived with their hampers of game on a cart, and as they entered the glen by the lower pass, the original inhabitants retired by the upper, (bearing their dead, their dying, the sick, aged, and little ones, slung in plaids over the shoulders of the stoutest men,) towards the only shelter that remained to them—and assuredly the last which the Gael would think of adopting—the old ruined chapel of St. Colme upon the sea-beaten rocks of the western coast, for, as no Highland landlord will allow the evicted tenants of another to tarry within his bounds, the graveyards alone are now the neutral ground. There among the tombs they formed a new bivouac above the long rank grass that wrapped their fathers' dust. Close by were the moss-covered and lichen-spotted ruins of the old chapel, where the owl and the bat had their nests, and where the sombre ivy grew in luxuriance—a place of many solemn memories and many legendary terrors.
Location of every kind was refused by the adjacent proprietors; so with a vast tract of wild and rugged mountains and pathless hunting forests around them, our people were compelled to herd like cattle within the circular wall of the burying-ground; for most of the modern tyrants of the North share alike the love of game, the lust of gold, and a horror of the Celtic race.
It was on the fourth day that the widow of the Ca-Dearg (whose head had been fractured by the blow of a baton) died; and a cry for vengeance against her murderers went up to heaven from the denizens of that uncouth bivouac, as they committed her body to the earth; and it was fortunate that all the rifles and weapons of the people had been seized; for in Callum's breast and mine, there swelled up such a glow of fury, that we would assuredly have committed some fierce and retributive act, at which all Britain would have been startled.
'Are we slaves?' exclaimed Callum, furiously; 'I speak in English, Mac Innon; for, thank heaven, the Gaelic is theonlylanguage in the world that has no word expressive of slavery.'
'A bootless boast,' said I, gloomily; 'and what matters it, when we may be murdered with impunity?'
'Evil has come upon us like snow upon the mountains, unsought and unsent for,' said he, as we closed the grave of the soldier's widow; 'poor old woman! Her blood has been shed by a staff that bore the royal crown and cypher—and for that crown her three brave sons are fighting in the East. A chial! a Highland soldier, or a Highland soldier's mother, are of less value than a grouse or plover—a sheep or a cow; for they cannot be shot for pleasure like the former, nor fattened to feed the southern market like the latter; and it is for a Government that treats us thus our soldiers fight and die!Is samhach an obair dol a dholaidh!'
'Alas, yes—silent is the progress of ruin!' I replied, repeating the proverb; 'but had our glen been in Tipperary, at what premium would the lives of Snaggs and Sir Horace been insured?'
'Sir Horace has driven us forth, that our glen may be peopled by wild animals;but if fire will burn, by the five wounds of God, and by the Black Stone of Scone, he will make little of that!' swore Callum, in a hoarse Gaelic whisper.
There was a dark and savage gleam in his hazel eyes as he spoke; and though aware that he referred to a project of vengeance, I cared not then to ask what it was.
Old Mhari was the wise woman and chief adviser and mediciner of the glen; she placed implicit belief in a hundred charms, spells, traditions, and absurdities that have come down to us through long and misty ages—yea, since the days of Fingal; for the supernatural is full of charms to the mind of a mountaineer. Thus Mhari was the custodier of one of those sanctified girdles which were usually kept in many Highland families, and which were bound about women in childbed. They were impressed with strange and mystic figures; and the ceremony of binding was accompanied by words of Druidical origin; but Mhari was sorely perplexed and bewildered when the wife of Gillespie Ruadh expired amid the tempest, with this ancient girdle of maternity around her.
In a revengeful spirit, that bordered on the necromantic malevolence of the olden time, she fashioned an image of clay, which she named 'Ephraim Snaggs,' and selecting a time when the moon was full, placed it in a runnel which distilled between the rocks from a lonely tarn, among the sedges of which the dusky water-ouzel laid its eggs, and where the lazy bittern, whose croak forebodes a storm, made its home; and she believed that as the stream washed away the clay, and reduced it to a shapeless mass, and from thence to mere mud, so would the ungainly person of Mr. Ephraim Snaggs waste, pine, and decay: but most unfortunately, and greatly to the injury of Mhari's local reputation, this incantation of the nineteenth century turned out a complete failure; for though the runnel washed away the image in less than three days, Snaggs remained unharmed and well as ever; for we frequently saw him trotting his pony along the mountain path which led to the house of Sir Horace Everingham.
Though supported by the secret charity of the neighbouring clachans, our poor people were meanwhile enduring great misery. Their nights were passed shelterless among the dreary shades of the dead—each mother with her children clinging round her in terror and hunger; for their principal sustenance had been herbs, mountain-berries, and cold water.
Each morning they thanked God that another night was past; and each night they thanked Him for the sorrowful day that was gone. The wind whistled drearily from the ocean round the open ruins, and over the long grassy graves, and bare, bleak headland of St. Colme. It seemed to bear on its breath a wailing sound, like a dirge of the dying, as it swept through the old yew-trees—but this, of course, was fancy.
With a heart that vibrated between love and hatred, anger and sorrow, I thought of Laura Everingham.
If the regret she expressed so prettily and so pithily for her father's previous severity and his Victor's cruelty was sincere, what would her emotions be now?
But days passed away, and no message from her ever reached me at that wretched hut, which the poor but hospitable priest had invited me to share. This neglect stung me to the soul, and caused an anger that not even the memory of Laura's winning kindness, the strange admissions of Snobleigh in the avenue, and the memory of her soft smile or the beauty of her person could subdue; but I knew not that during this, our time of calamity, she and Fanny Clavering were paying a visit to a noble marquis, whose exterminating propensities have made him famous as one of the chief 'Barriersto the prosperity of Scotland.'
Meanwhile Sir Horace, Sheriff Mac Fee, and Mr. Snaggs, after a voluminous correspondence with the Board of Supervision, had a steamer despatched to Loch Ora, to convey our people to Glasgow, where (without being landed) they were to be thrust like slaves on board of a vessel bound for America. Their final expatriation was fully resolved on by the trio; and none of the evicted were consulted either as to their wishes or destination, as they were alleged to be poor and ignorant Celts, who knew no language but their native Gaelic, and were helpless and stricken alike by poverty, sickness, and a wholesome terror of the powers that be.
The night was pitchy dark and somewhat stormy, when our poor outcasts saw the steamer that was to convey them for ever from their loved Highland home, ploughing the lonely waters of the deep salt loch that opened into the mountains; and a wail of despair ascended from the bleak burial promontory, as they heard the roar of the escaping steam, and the plunge of the descending anchor, when the vessel came to her moorings. Then the red light at her mast-head was watched for hours by the doomed and expatriated clansmen with emotions which no pen can describe, or pencil portray.
On this night it was averred that thewhite staghad been seen to hover near us in the gloom.
Low down along the base of Ben Ora, round the shore of the mirrored loch, and in the dark glen they had left, our people saw a wondrous blaze of light that illuminated the sky—that tinged the clouds with wavering fire, and lit the cold grey rocks and hills—the waving woods, and ghastly corries. It widened and grew on every hand, that marvellous sheet of flame, seeming to embrace the whole country in its fiery grasp; and with shouts of fear and wonder, the poor people, while gazing on this phenomenon, forgot for a time their own sorrows, and the approaching hour of their final expatriation.
On this night Callum and I were loitering in the glen, among the ruins of our once-peaceful and contented mountain hamlet; but oppressed by sadness, on witnessing the new desolation of the place, we wandered three or four miles away, and there older scenes of barbarity awaited us.
We sat down on some piles of stones that were half shrouded by the rising dog-grass, the moss, and the long feathery bracken. These marked the site of a few huts. Here once dwelt a brave little community named the Mac Ellars, one of whom had been my tutor, and here I had attended his little school, bringing each day with me, like other boys, a peat, as a contribution to his fire; for this is the old Highland custom, and the urchin who failed to do so was denied the privilege of warming his kilted legs for that day. Here often had I played the truant, and been threatened by my mother withthe Druid—that venerable bugbear of the Highland urchin.
The Mac Ellars were all brave and hardy men, whose progenitors had occupied their 'holdings' since the days of Lachlan Mohr; and it was with them that Callum made the famous riot in Glen Ora, when burning the effigies of a certain English historian, and his miserable Scottish imitator, for their falsehoods and absurd antipathy to the clansmen and their national characteristics. But the youth of the clachan, twelve sturdy young lads, had been cajoled by a noble marquis and the duchess, his mother, into the ranks of the Sutherland Highlanders, and had marched to fight the Russians:thentheir cottages were levelled, and their aged parents were driven forth to beg, to starve, or die—tidings, no doubt, but ill-calculated to rouse the patriotism or fan theamor patriæof the poor Celtic soldier, when chewing his green coffee in the frozen trenches of Sebastopol, or sinking under disease, with other victims of treachery and mismanagement, in the frightful hospital at Scutari; but fortunately for our Government, the poor clansman is animated by a love of home, which neither time can efface nor tyranny destroy. Thus were the Mac Ellars rooted out—the young sent to storm Sebastopol—the old to starve in the Lowlands, while the marquis and hispassémother were in a state of fervid Uncle Tommery, and, inspired by Mrs. Stowe's romance, were the leaders and patrons of anti-slavery meetings in the South, and fustian addresses to the women of America.
The ruined cottages which are met with at every few miles, amid the depopulated portions of our Highlands, dotting those vast glens which are silent and voiceless now as the most savage wilds of Hudson's Bay, or the great desert of Zahara, are well calculated to excite emotions of melancholy, as being the last relics of an old and departed race.
The wild gooseberry-bushes straggling among the stones; the old well, half choked by sand or weeds; the half-flattened fences; the garden-flowers growing rank among the encroaching heather, all told us the visual melancholy tale; and Callum and I sat in silence on the mossy stones, watching the daylight dying away beyond the distant sea, and full of our own sad and bitter thoughts.
He seemed wholly intent on polishing the butt of a steel Highland pistol, and while he did so, there hovered a dark and sombre aspect of ferocity on his brow.
We were silent, I have said, for both were too much oppressed to speak. Suddenly a black cock appeared on a fragment of rock near us, and clapped his wings as if in defiance. Quick as lightning Callum levelled the pistol and shot him dead; a moment the outstpread pinions beat the heather, and then lay still, while the pistol-shot was pealing among the echoes of the wilderness. My fosterer leisurely reloaded and brought the bird to me; it was large, weighing more than five pounds, its sable plumage glazed all over with a shining blue, and its stomach gorged with bilberries.
'I hope the report may not reach the ear of some rascally keeper,' said I, throwing a hasty glance about me; 'if so, we shall be accused of poaching. It was a risk, Callum, to shoot that bird just now.'
'It is the last shot I may ever have on a Highland mountain,' said Callum Dhu, with a fierce sigh; 'and with little regret would I have put the same ball into the fat brisket of Sir Horace himself, if he stood within twelve paces of me, on this red heather to-night.'
'For heaven's sake, Callum, do not speak thus,' said I; 'Sir Horace is less to blame than his evil mentor, Snaggs—I believe that in heart he is rather amiable.'
'Listen, Co-dhalta!' retorted Callum, turning upon me, and gazing with a full and angry frown. 'You love this man's daughter, and I like it as little as the good lady your mother (now, God rest her, in her grave) would have done. You love one who despises you—and yet your blood is as red as any in Scotland!'
'She does not despise me!' I responded, almost fiercely.
'Yet loving her is folly.'
'A folly that makes me happy.'
'A folly that makes you miserable! Will you remember her only as the daughter of one who has the lives of Gillespie's wife and child, and of the widow of the Oa-Dearg to answer for?'
'Sir Horace is no worse than the canting Marquis, or a hundred other proprietors in the North.'
'That is saying but little—there are many great men in Scotland still, deserving the dagger of Kirkpatrick and the bullet of Bothwellhaugh—and great is the pity that such pretty things have gone out of fashion. The best tune Rory Dall ever played men will tire of; and so I am tired of this Lowlander's tyranny.'
'He is no Lowlander, Callum,' said I, anxiously observing the fierce expression of my companion.
'He is an Englishman, which is almost as bad.'
I burst into a fit of laughter at this remark.
'Ah—you laugh,' said Callum, grimly; 'let us see whose laugh will be loudest to-morrow. He has cleared the glen of men to make way for game—let us see what he will gain by that—the club-footed ouzel.'
'How?' I asked, glancing in alarm at the pistol on which he was carefully placing a percussion cap.
'This very night I shall fire the heather.'
'For heaven's sake, Callum,' said I, 'beware what you do; for the consequent destruction of life and property may be terrible.'
'I care not—these lords and holiday-chiefs are destroying the people—let the people destroy the game that brings them gold. I will fire the heather, I tell you!' he added, in a fierce Gaelic whisper; 'by that blessed star which led the wise men to the cradle of God, I have sworn to do so, and it shall be done, come of it what may!'
I was about to speak again, when the clatter of hoofs rang on the mountain-path, and Mr. Snaggs passed us on his shaggy-coated cob. Anger swelled my breast on seeing him; but he bowed to us with an ironical smile, and we saw—or thought we saw—that his eyes were brilliant with malice at the success of that "ingenious ferocity" with which he had extirpated the peasantry of the district. He rode slowly up the slope of the great Ben, and the outlines of his ungainly figure and barrel-bellied charger appeared in dark relief between us and the yellow flush that bathed the western sky.
'What errand takes him to the Craig-na-tuirc to-night?' I remarked.
'The devil only knows: perhaps to see the desolation he has made, and whether any of our people have lit a fire in the glens below. There he goes—may evil follow, and destruction dog him close! may the curse of the poor on whom he tramples, and the scorn of the rich whom he worships, be his lot! I'll show them a flame on Ben Ora to-night that will startle all the Western Highlands!'
Callum drew forth his powder-horn, and after casting a keen but furtive glance around him in the dusk, and after seeing Mr. Snaggs fairly disappear in a hollow of the hills, he shook out the contents, laying across the narrow mouth of the glen a train on the soft dry heather and its bed of turf and decayed moss below. Careless of the event, and now resigned to whatever might follow, I observed him in moody silence, and not without feeling within me that longing for revenge which is so curiously mingled in the Celtic nature, with a wild sense of justice and of injury.
'This is a crime against the law,' said I, in a low voice, remembering thatmuirburningis a serious offence in Scotland, and that the Acts passed by the Parliaments of the first, third, fourth, and fifth Jameses concerning it, are alike stringent and severe.
'Curse upon the laws,' grumbled Callum; 'if none were made, they would never be violated,' and with these words he emptied the last contents of his horn. Again he looked round him.
The sun had set long since; the tints of the vast mountain had turned from purple to black, and no living thing seemed to be stirring in that intense solitude. Callum stooped, and fired his pistol at the train. The powder flashed, and rose like a fiery serpent along the grass; the dry summer-moss, the decayed leaves and dead ferns ignited like tinder, and in a moment the thick heath and its bed of turf and peat below were wrapped in smoke and flame—a flame that spread on every hand, deepening and extending, as it rolled, like a devouring and encroaching tide, mounting up the sides of the glen before the soft west wind that blew from the dark waves of the salt lake.
Fiercely it crackled, smouldered, and burned, in those places where the bracken or whins, the burr-docks, brambles, rank weeds, and gorse grew thick; but in others it rolled steadily on with great rapidity, spreading and widening in the form of a vast semi-circle, as if it would embrace the whole country in its grasp. As it mounted into the higher portions of the landscape, and seized on the thickets of silver birch and the resinous mountain-pine, the conflagration began to crackle, roar, and hiss, and its flames to shoot aloft and brighten against the sky like the wavering beams of the Northern Lights, tinging the clouds with pink and purple hues.
Now sheep and cattle, horses, rabbits, foxes, and fuimarts, with herds of frantic deer, fled before the flames; and screaming in their terror and confusion, the muirfowl flew hither and thither, or hung overhead among the vapour that shrouded the starry sky. The scene was strange, wild, and terrible; the more so that amid all this general alarm of nature there was not heard the voice of man in wonder or in fear; but the glens had been swept of their people, and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air alone remained.
With astonishment and somewhat of awe, I gazed on this strange and striking scene, while Callum Dhu surveyed it with a grim smile of triumph and derision on his weather-beaten face, which was reddened by the distant glow.
This was one of the most dreadful instances of muirburning that ever occurred in Scotland: the flames travelled at the rate of one hundred and fifty yards a minute, and soon embraced a front of nearly sixteen miles in length, being four miles more than that tide of fire which lately devoured the moors of Strathaven.
The whole of the muirlands—covered with short dry summer heather, the thickets of fir and the game preserves round the base of Ben Ora, from the mouth of the glen where we sat to the deep dark gorge of Garchoine, from the shore of the loch on the east to the hazel wood of Coilchro on the west, where the narrow path to St. Colme's chapel overhangs the foaming sea—a semicircle, as I have said, of sixteen miles—were sheeted in red and yellow flame. Above the mighty wreaths of smoke which rose from the blazing and falling plantations, and from the remains of old primeval forests, towered the huge mountain—the monarch of the western hills—like a dark and wonderous dome. At its base lay the loch gleaming in light, and seeming, in this nocturnal blaze, like a mighty mirror zoned by the smoke and fire, which gradually crept from the low districts upward to the summit of the craigs and hills, where it played in streaks of deep and fiery red, or flashed upward in forky and lambent flames before it died away in vapour.
In the deep and naked ravines, and those places over which the fire had passed, sweeping like a burning tide, the nests and lairs of the game, with every trace of animal and vegetable life, passed away, leaving only the bare black roots of the turf and heather, while vast columns of smoke hung motionless, like giants in mid-air as if the fires of the Day of Doom had sent them forth; and through these murky masses the broad round moon at times peered dimly and darkly out, like Fingal's shield, half hidden and half seen.
'Down, Mac Innon, down!' cried Callum, as a herd of terrified deer came rushing like a living torrent down a narrow ravine, which was threaded by a mountain stream, up the margin of which we were now ascending, as being the safest pathway through this land of fire: 'Hoigh! look at Mac Gilonie's dun cattle, how they come thundering down with the sparks at their heels!'
These words were barely uttered, when the frantic herd—three hundred and more—were upon us, with all their branching antlers lashing the air; but as we threw ourselves flat on our faces among the long bracken and dog-grass, this four-footed tempest swept lightly over us, and disappeared towards the seashore.