John Splendid Part 34

"I've had my chance of common life, city and town, and the company of ladies with broidery and camisole and washen faces," he answered with no hesitation, "and give me the highroad and freedom and the very brute of simplicity. I'm not of these parts. I'm not of the Highlands at all, as you may guess, though I've been in them and through them for many a day.

I see you're still vexed about my woman's reading of your palm. It seems to have fitted in with some of your experience."

I confessed her knowledge of my private affairs surprised me, and his black eyes twinkled with humour.

"I'll explain the puzzle for just as much money as you gave her," said he, "and leave you more satisfied at the end than she did. And there's no black art at the bottom of my skill either."

"Very well," said I; "here's your drink-money; now tell me the trick of it, for trick I suppose it is."

He pocketed the money after a vagabond's spit on the coin for luck, and in twenty words exposed his by-love's device. They had just come from Inneraora two or three days before, and the tale of the Provost's daughter in Strongara had been the talk of the town.

"But how did your wife guess the interest of the lady in a man of Argile's army?" I asked.

"Because she spaed the lady's fortune too," he answered, "and she had to find out in the neighbourhood what it was like to be before she did so; you know that is half the art of the thing."

"Yet your woman's guess that I was the man--that's beyond me!"

"I was struck myself when she out with that," he confessed. "Oh, she's a deep one, Jean! But your manner and tongue betrayed the returned soldier of fortune; of such officers in the ranks of Argile there are not so many that it was risking too much to believe all of them knew the story of the Provost's daughter, and your conduct, once she got that length, did the rest."

"And about kins.h.i.+p's courting?" I asked, amazed at the simplicity of the thing.

The man dashed his fee on the board and ordered more liquor.

"Drink up," said he, "and drown care if you're the man my good-wife thought you, for faith there's a little fellow from over the loch making himself very snug in the lady's company in your absence."

There was no more drinking for me; the fumes of this wretched company stank in my nostril, and I must be off to be alone with melancholy. Up I got and walked to the door with not fair-good-e'en nor fair-good-day, and I walked through the beginnings of a drab disheartening dawn in the direction that I guessed would lead me soonest to Bredalbane. I walked with a mind painfully downcast, and it was not till I reached a little hillock a good distance from the Inns at Tynree, a hillock clothed with saugh saplings and conspicuously high over the flat countryside, that I looked about me to see where I was.

CHAPTER XXVIII.--LOST ON THIS MOOR OF KANNOCH.

I stood on the hillock clothed with its stunted saughtrees and waited for the day that was mustering somewhere to the cast, far by the frozen sea of moss and heather tuft. A sea more lonely than any ocean the most wide and distant, where no s.h.i.+p heaves, and no isle lifts beckoning trees above the level of the waves; a sea soundless, with no life below its lamentable surface, no little fish or proud leviathan plunging and romping and flas.h.i.+ng from the silver roof of fretted wave dishevelled to the deep profound. The moorfowl does not cry there, the coney has no habitation. It rolled, that sea so sour, so curdled, from my feet away to mounts I knew by day stupendous and not so far, but now in the dark so hid that they were but troubled clouds upon the distant marge. There was a day surely when, las.h.i.+ng up on those hills around, were waters blue and stinging, and some plague-breath blew on them and they s.h.i.+vered and dried and cracked into this parched semblance of what they were in the old days when the galleys sailed over. No galleys now. No white birds calling eagerly in the storm. No stiver bead of spray. Only in its season the cannoch tuft, and that itself but spa.r.s.ely; the very bluebell shuns a track so desolate, the st.u.r.dy gall itself finds no nourishment here.

The grey day crept above the land; I watched it from my hillock, and I shrunk in my clothing that seemed so poor a s.h.i.+elding in a land so chill. A cold clammy dawn, that never cleared even as it aged, but held a hint of mist to come that should have warned me of the danger I faced in venturing on the untravelled surface of the moor, even upon its safer verge. But it seemed so simple a thing to keep low to the left and down on Glenurchy that I thought little of the risk, if I reflected upon it at all.

Some of the stupidity of my venturing out on the surface of Rannoch that day must have been due to my bodily state. I was not all there, as the saying goes. I was suffering mind and body from the strain of my adventures, and most of all from the stormy thras.h.i.+ngs of the few days before--the long journey, the want of reasonable sleep and food. There had come over all my spirit a kind of dwam, so that at times my head seemed as if it were stuffed with wool; what mattered was of no account, even if it were a tinker's death in the sheuch. No words will describe the feeling except to such as themselves have known it; it is the condition of the man dead with care and weariness so far as the body is concerned, and his spirit, sorry to part company, goes lugging his flesh about the highways.

I was well out on Rannoch before the day was full awake on the country, walking at great trouble upon the coa.r.s.e barren soil, among rotten bog-gra.s.s, lichened stones, and fir-roots that thrust from the black peatlike skeletons of antiquity. And then I came on a cl.u.s.ter of lochs--grey, cold, vagrant lochs--still to some degree in the thrall of frost Here's one who has ever a fancy for such lochans, that are lost and sobbing, sobbing, even-on among the hills, where the reeds and the rushes hiss in the wind, and the fowls with sheeny feather make night and day cheery with their call But not those lochs of Rannoch, those black basins crumbling at the edge of a rotten soil. I skirted them as far off as I could, as though they were the lochans of a nightmare that drag the traveller to their kelpie tenants' arms. There were no birds among those rushes; I think the very deer that roamed in the streets of Inneraora in the Novembers blast would have run far clear of so stricken a territory. It must be horrible in snow, it must be lamentable in the hottest days of summer, when the sun rides over the land, for what does the most kindly season bring to this forsaken place except a scorching for the fugitive wild-flower, if such there be?

These were not my thoughts as I walked on my way; they are what lie in my mind of the feelings the Moor of Rannoch will rouse in every stranger. What was in my mind most when I was not altogether in the swound of wearied flesh was the spae-wife's story of the girl in Inneraora, and a jealousy so strong that I wondered where, in all my exhausted frame, the pa.s.sion for it came from. I forgot my friends left in Dalness, I forgot that my compact and prudence itself called for my hurrying the quickest way I could to the Brig of Urchy; I walked in an indifference until I saw a wan haze spread fast over the country in the direction of the lower hills that edged the desert I looked with a careless eye on it at first, not reflecting what it might mean or how much it might lead to. It spread with exceeding quickness, a grey silver smoke rolling out on every hand, as if puffed continually from some glen in the hills. I looked behind me, and saw that the same was happening all around. Unless I made speed out of this sorrowful place I was caught in the mist Then I came to the full understanding that trouble was to face. I tightened the thongs of my shoes, pinched up a hole in my waist-belt, scrugged my bonnet, and set out at a deer-stalker's run across the moor. I splashed in hags and stumbled among roots; I made wild leaps across poisonous-looking holes stewing to the brim with coloured water; I made long detours to find the most fordable part of a stream that twisted back and forth, a very devil's cantrip, upon my way. Then a smirr of rain came at my back and chilled me to the marrow, though the sweat of travail a moment before had been on every part of me, and even dripping in beads from my chin. At length I lifted my eyes from the ground that I had to scan most carefully in my running, and behold! I was swathed in a dense mist that cut off every view of the world within ten yards of where I stood. This cruel experience dashed me more than any other misadventure in all my wanderings, for it cut me off, without any hope of speedy betterment, from the others of our broken band. They might be all at Urchy Bridge by now, on the very selvedge of freedom, but I was couped by the heels more disastrously than ever. Down I sat on a tuft of moss, and I felt cast upon the dust by a most cruel providence.

How long I sat there I cannot tell; it may have been a full hour or more, it may have been but a pause of some minutes, for I was in a stupor of bitter disappointment And when I rose again I was the sport of chance, for whether my way lay before me or lay behind me, or to left or right, was altogether beyond my decision. It was well on in the day: high above this stagnant plain among tall bens there must be s.h.i.+ning a friendly and constant sun; but Elrigmore, gentleman and sometime cavalier of Mackay's Scots, was in the very gullet of night for all he could see around him. It was folly, I knew; but on somewhere I must be going, so I took to where my nose led, picking my way with new caution among the bogs and boulders. The neighbourhood of the lochs was a sort of guidance in some degree, for their immediate presence gave to a nostril sharpened by life in the wild a moist and peaty odour fresh from the corroding banks. I sought them and I found them, and finding them I found a danger even greater than my loss in that desolate plain. For in the grey smoke of mist those treacherous pools crept noiselessly to my feet, and once I had almost walked blindly into an ice-clear turgid little lake. My foot sank in the mire of it almost up to the knees ere I jumped to the nature of my neighbourhood, and with an effort little short of miraculous in the state of my body, threw myself back on the safe bank, clear of the death-trap.

And again I sat on a hillock and surrendered to the most doleful meditations. Noon came and went, the rain pa.s.sed and came again, and pa.s.sed once more, and still I was guessing my way about the lochs, making no headway from their neighbourhood, and, to tell the truth, a little glad of the same, for they were all I knew of the landscape in Moor Rannoch, and something of friends.h.i.+p was in their treacherous presence, and to know they were still beside me, though it said little for my progress to Glenurchy, was an a.s.surance that I was not making my position worse by going in the wrong airt.

All about me, when the rain was gone for the last time, there was a cry of waters, the voices of the burns running into the lochans, tinkling, tinkling, tinkling merrily, and all out of key with a poor wretch in draggled tartans, fleeing he knew not whither, but going about in shortened circles like a hedgehog in the sea.

The mist made no sign of lifting all this time, but shrouded the country as if it were come to stay for ever, and I was doomed to remain till the end, guessing my way to death in a silver-grey reek. I strained my ears, and far off to the right I heard the sound of cattle bellowing, the snorting low of a stirk upon the hillside when he wonders at the lost pastures of his calfhood in the merry summer before. So out I set in that direction, and more bellowing arose, and by-and-by, out of the mist but still far off, came a long low wail that baffled me. It was like no sound nature ever conferred on the Highlands, to my mind, unless the rare call of the Benderloch wolf in rigorous weather. I stopped and listened, with my inner head cracking to the strain, and as I was thus standing in wonder, a great form leaped out at me from the mist, and almost ran over me ere it lessened to the semblance of a man, and I had John M'Iver of Barbreck, a heated and hurried gentleman of arms, in my presence.

He drew up with a shock, put his hand to his vest, and I could see him cross himself under the jacket.

"Not a bit of it," I cried; "no wraith nor warlock this time, friend, but flesh and blood. Yet I'm bound to say I have never been nearer ghostdom than now; a day of this moor would mean death to me."

He shook me hurriedly and warmly by the hand, and stared in my face, and stammered, and put an arm about my waist as if I were a girl, and turned me about and led me to a little tree that lifted its barren branches above the moor. He was in such a confusion and hurry that I knew something troubled him, so I left him to choose his own time for explanation. When we got to the tree, he showed me his black knife--a very long and deadly weapon--laid along his wrist, and "Out dirk," said he; "there's a dog or two of Italy on my track here." His mind, by the stress of his words, was like a hurricane.

Now I knew something of the Black Dogs of Italy, as they were called, the abominable hounds that were kept by the Camerons and others mainly for the hunting down of the Gregarich.

"Were they close on you?" I asked, as we prepared to meet them.

"Do you not hear them bay?" said he. "There were three on my track: I struck one through the throat with my knife and ran, for two Italian hounds to one knife is a poor bargain. Between us we should get rid of them before the owners they lag for come up on their tails."

"You should thank G.o.d who got you out of a trouble so deep," I said, astounded at the miracle of his escape so far.

"Oh ay," said he; "and indeed I was pretty clever myself, or it was all bye with me when one of the black fellows set his fangs in my hose. Here are his partners; short work with it, on the neck or low at the belly with an up cut, and ward your throat."

The two dogs ran with ferocious growls at us as we stood by the little tree, their faces gaping and their quarters streaked with foam. Strong cruel brutes, they did not swither a moment, but both leaped at M'Iver's throat. With one swift slash of the knife, my companion almost cut the head off the body of the first, and I reckoned with the second. They rolled at our feet, and a silence fell on the country. Up M'Iver put his shoulders, dighted his blade on a tuft of bog-gra.s.s, and whistled a stave of the tune they call "The Desperate Battle."

"If I had not my lucky penny with me I would wonder at this meeting,"

said he at last, eyeing me with a look of real content that he should so soon have fallen into my company at a time when a meeting was so unlikely. "It has failed me once or twice on occasions far less important; but that was perhaps because of my own fumbling, and I forgive it all because it brought two brave lads together like barks of one port on the ocean. 'Up or down?' I tossed when it came to putting fast heels below me, and 'up' won it, and here's the one man in all broad Albainn I would be seeking for, drops out of the mist at the very feet of me. Oh, I'm the most wonderful fellow ever stepped heather, and I could be making a song on myself there and then if occasion allowed.

Some people have genius, and that, I'm telling you, is well enough so far as it goes; but I have luck too, and I'm not so sure but luck is a hantle sight better than genius. I'm guessing you have lost your way in the mist now?"

He looked quizzingly at me, and I was almost ashamed to admit that I had been in a maze for the greater part of the morning.

"And no skill for getting out of it?" he asked.

"No more than you had in getting into it," I confessed.

"My good scholar," said he, "I could walk you out into a drove-road in the time you would be picking the bog from your feet I'm not making any brag of an art that's so common among old hunters as the snaring of conies; but give me a bush or a tree here and there in a flat land like this, and an herb here and there at my feet, and while winds from the north blow snell, I'll pick my way by them. It's my notion that they learn one many things at colleges that are no great value in the real trials of life. You, I make no doubt, would be kenning the name of an herb in the Latin, and I have but the Gaelic for it, and that's good enough for me; but I ken the use of it as a traveller's friend whenever rains are smirring and mists are blowing."

"I daresay there's much in what you state," I confessed, honestly enough; "I wish I could change some of my schooling for the art of winning off Moor Rannoch."

He changed his humour in a flash. "Man," said he, "I'm maybe giving myself overmuch credit at the craft; it's so seldom I put it to the trial that if we get clear of the Moor before night it'll be as much to your credit as to mine."

As it happened, his vanity about his gift got but a brief gratification, for he had not led me by his signs more than a mile on the way to the south when we came again to a cl.u.s.ter of lochans, and among them a large fellow called Loch Ba, where the mist was lifting quickly. Through the cleared air we travelled at a good speed, off the Moor, among Bredalbane braes, and fast though we went it was a weary march, but at last we reached Loch Tulla, and from there to the Bridge of Urchy was no more than a meridian daunder.

The very air seemed to change to a kinder feeling in this, the frontier of the home-land. A scent of wet birk was in the wind. The river, hurrying through gra.s.sy levels, glucked and clattered and plopped most gaily, and bubble chased bubble as if all were in a haste to reach Lochow of the bosky isles and holy. Oh! but it was heartsome, and as we rested ourselves a little on the banks we were full of content to know we were now in a friendly country, and it was a fair pleasure to think that the dead leaves and broken branches we threw in the stream would be dancing in all likelihood round the isle of Innishael by nightfall.

We ate our chack with exceeding content, and waited for a time on the chance that some of our severed company from Dalness would appear, though M'Iyer's instruction as to the rendezvous had been given on the prospect that they would reach the Brig earlier in the day. But after an hour or two of waiting there was no sign of them, and there was nothing for us but to a.s.sume that they had reached the Brig by noon as agreed on and pa.s.sed on their way down the glen. A signal held together by two stones on the glen-side of the Brig indeed confirmed this notion almost as soon as we formed it, and we were annoyed that we had not observed it sooner. Three sprigs of gall, a leaf of ivy from the bridge arch where it grew in dark green sprays of glossy sheen, and a bare twig of oak standing up at a slant, were held down on the parapet by a peeled willow withy, one end of which pointed in the direction of the glen.

It was M'Iver who came on the symbols first, and "We're a day behind the fair," said he. "Our friends are all safe and on their way before us; look at that."

I confessed I was no hand at puzzles.

"Man," he said, "there's a whole history in it! Three sprigs of gall mean three Campbells, do they not? and that's the baron-bailie and Sonachan, and this one with the leaves off the half-side is the fellow with the want And oak is Stewart--a very cunning clan to be fighting or foraying or travelling with, for this signal is Stewart's work or I'm a fool: the others had not the gumption for it. And what's the ivy but Clan Gordon, and the peeled withy but hurry, and--surely that will be doing for the reading of a very simple tale. Let us be taking our ways.

I have a great admiration for Stewart that he managed to do so well with this thing, but I could have bettered that sign, if it were mine, by a chapter or two more."

"It contains a wonderful deal of matter for the look of it," I confessed.