The Spell of Scotland Part 18

"The thane of Cawdor lives A prosperous gentleman."

Not so prosperous now as when he lived in the life. Shakespeare took liberties with the Thane. He immortalized him into Macbeth! And Cawdor Castle, out from Nairn a few paces on the burn of Cawdor, might have been the very home of Macbeth. It is pleasant, flowery, lovely. But also, it is stern and looks like a castle for tragedy. But not for mystery. I did not hear a bird of prey, as some travelers report--

"The raven himself is hoa.r.s.e That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Cawdor Castle_]

There are iron girded doors and secret apartments; not for Macbeth, but for Lovat. This Lord of the Last Rising lived secretly for many months in Cawdor while the Prince was moving restlessly to and fro in the Islands. But the Prince was only twenty-five, and Lord Lovat was over eighty. I like to think he was as young and keen to adventure as the Prince. And I do not like to think of that beheading in the Tower--

"I must become a borrower of the night."

_Inverness_

The four chief cities of Scotland are arranged like a diamond for excursion and for history. Always Scotland, unlike Gaul, has been divided into four parts. Places of pilgrimage were Scone, Dundee, Paisley, Melrose. Places for the quartering of Montrose were Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, Stirling. And now four places are rivals; in trade somewhat, but Glasgow leads in beauty, but Edinburgh, after all, is unique in dignity, but Aberdeen is unbending; in the picturesque there remains Inverness.

The city deserves its honours. (William Black has painted it in "Wild Eelin.") It has a life of its own. For when I first came to Inverness there was a cattle fair on, and sheep from all over the kingdom, from Shrops.h.i.+re and from the Cheviots, came to be judged in Inverness; and men came with them who looked very modern and capable and worldly and commercial. It was all like a county fair of Iowa, only more dignified, with no touch of sideshow. And, of course, there is the Highland gathering in September, which has become too much like the sideshow, too much a show, to attract the groundlings, and not a gathering of the clans. Still--if one must take Scotland in a gulp--this is a very good chance at Highland colour and sound and remnants of valour.

The town itself is full of pictures. It does not announce itself. There is a close-built part, looking like a French provincial town, with gabled houses, and down on the banks of the Ness the women spread their clothes to dry as they do on a French river bank. There is a new cathedral, very new, with an angel at the font we remembered William Winter had liked, so we paid it respectful attention. There is a park on the Ness to the west, where many islands and many bridges form a spot of beauty.

And there is Tomnahurich--The Hill of the Fairies--a sudden steep hill-mound, where Inverness carries its dead--like the Indians who carried them to Indian mounds high above the rivers of the American West. The dark yews make it even more solemn; one wonders if the fairies dare play in these shades. But it is a sweetly solemn place, and we decided to care not what Invernessians lay buried here if we might sit on its convenient park benches and look at far rolling Scotland and think of fairies and of Thomas the Rimer, who, it seems, came hither all the way from Ercildoune from Melrose to heap this mound for his burial!

The errant Scots!

There remains no stone of Macbeth's Castle to which the gentle Duncan came--"And when goes hence?" The county buildings--and a jail!--stand on its site, a most modern pile. Malcolm razed that castle after he had returned from England, and after Birnam wood had come to Dunsinane. It was builded again; Inverness was a vantage point. Perhaps that one was burned by the Lord of the Isles who afterward came to repentance and to Holyrood. And builded again so that Huntley could defy Mary, and she could take the castle and order it razed. And builded again so that Cromwell could destroy it. And builded again as one of the five fortresses whereby he sought to hold Scotland "Protected." And destroyed at the Restoration which sought to destroy all the Protectorate had built. But builded again so it might be destroyed by Prince Charles Edward. No, I scarce think there is even the dust of the castle of Macbeth left in Inverness, or incorporated into modern Fort George. The "knock, knock, knock," which the porter heard at the gate, has battered down a score of ominous strongholds.

But still

"The castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses."

For all the north of Scotland, away from the east winds, is pleasant and lovely, with the mean climate that of London, and possible in winter and summer.

In the grounds there stands a statue of Flora Macdonald looking out to the West, and carrying the legend--

"On hills that are by right his ain He roams a lanely stranger."

Could legend be better chosen to compress and carry all that story of loyalty and courage and devotion?

And so we moved out to Culloden.

It was on a gray wind-swept afternoon that we made our pilgrimage. There was no sense of rain. It was a hard sky. It spread leaden to the world.

We chose to walk the six mile stretch. Not with comfort or any show of splendour, not even with a one-horse carriage, would we approach Culloden.

The road leads over lonely Drumossie moor through a plantation of firs, to a wild and naked spot--where all that was Scotland and nothing else was burned out of the world by the withering fire of c.u.mberland, and the remnant that would not save itself but fought to the last was cut to pieces by his order.

I do not suppose that even on a hot sweet afternoon could any one with a drop of Scotch blood come hither and not feel in his face the rain and sleet of that seventeenth of April day, 1746. If one comes on that day the cairn is hung with flowers, white roses of course, for there are still Jacobites left in the world who have given to no other king their allegiance. "Pretender!" cried Lady Strange to one who had mis-spoken in her presence, "Pretender and be dawmned to ye!"

No, it was not the Pa.s.s of Thermopylae, nor a Pickett's charge. Nor was it even war.

Nevertheless it was one of the brave moments in human history. If hopeless and even meaningless, does not bravery give it meaning? The Highlanders--they were the last Jacobites left, as the army of the Butcher, c.u.mberland, George Second's fat son swept northward and stopped for their larder to be well-filled before they went on--had had only a biscuit, the day before! They were five thousand to the English ten thousand.

At eleven in the morning the Highlanders moved forward, the pipers playing brave music, and they recked not that the English had the chosen ground; theirs was not even a forlorn hope. Not if the Macdonalds, sulky because they were on the left when since Bannockburn they had been on the right, had fired a shot would the end have been different.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BATTLEFIELD OF CULLODEN.]

On the battlefield, looking at these mounds, the long trench of the dead, one realizes that Scotland lies buried here. M'Gillivray, M'Lean, M'Laughlin, Cameron, Mackintosh, Stuart of Appin--so many brave names.

"The lovely la.s.s of Inverness, Nae joy nor pleasure can she see, For e'en and morn she cries, alas!

And ay the saut tear blin's her e'e--

"Drumossie muir, Drumossie day!

A waefu' day it was to me!

For there I lost my father dear, My father dear, and brothers three.

"Their winding sheet the bluidy clay-- Their graves are growing green to see; And by them lies the dearest lad That ever blest a woman's e'e.

"Now wae to thee, thou cruel lord!

A bluidy man I trow thou be; For mony a heart thou hast made sair That ne'er did wrong to them or thee."

The small remnant that was left, and was not butchered by c.u.mberland, fled to the West. Sometimes one could wish Prince Charles had died at Culloden! and yet one would not spare the wanderings, or Flora Macdonald. Thousands of the men fled to America; thousands of Scots in America to-day can say, "My great grandfather fought at Culloden."

Hundreds of Scots to-day are sent "home" from America to be educated. I have met in the magnificent Highlands of Montana, Scotchmen, true Highlanders, who had been sent to Edinburgh university that they might be Scots, even though they carried "American" blood in their veins.

When Boswell and Johnson came here in 1773, twenty-seven years after the Forty Five, they found that many of the Highlanders were going to America, leaving the lairds and the land. One M'Queen of Glenmorison was about to go.

"Dr. Johnson said he wished M'Queen laird of Glenmorison, and the laird to go to America. M'Queen very generously answered he should be sorry for it; for the laird could not s.h.i.+ft for himself in America as he could do."

Small wonder that Prince Charles, knowing of this exodus, and believing life still held for him its chances, its glories, away from Rome and even if he was fifty-five, looked longingly over the sea, in 1776, thinking that he might lead these rebellious colonists, so many of them of his rebellious people, and reestablish the House of Stewart in the New World. Surely Burr, coming with Blennerha.s.set, thirty years after, had something of the Stewart in him.

_The Orkneys_

Scotland is divided by a deep geologic cleft. Glenmore, the Great Glen, runs southwesterly from Inverness to Fort William and Oban, cutting the country into two parts. One is Scotland; the other is the West, the Highlands and the Islands. One is known, the other unknown. One has been prosperous, royal, n.o.ble; the other has been wild, independent, chief and clans holding together. To-day, if the East is strangely quiet, the West is strangely silent.

In the East you know things have happened; remnants remain, ruined castles testify; in the West it is as though they had not happened, those far historic things; castles are heaps of blackened or crumbled stone; or, if they stand, they stand like prehistoric remnants, and the clachans are emptied; the Risings, the migrations, the evictions, the extensions of deer forests and sheep pastures and grouse preserves, the poverty, yes, and the wandering spirit of the people leading them ever afar--where always they are Scottish down to the last drop, always looking toward Home, but ever leaving it empty of their presence.

It is a stranger land, though so lovingly familiar, than any I have ever been in. I have been in valleys of the Rockies which were not so lonely as glens in Scotland. When Hood wrote his sonnet on "Silence," beginning

"There is a silence where hath been no sound,"

He went on to a correction--

"But in the antique palaces where man hath been."

He missed the note of glens and valleys where man has been and is not.

From the Great Glen, a series of lochs lying in a geologic "fault," and connected more than a century ago by a series of locks, excursion may be had into remote places, so very remote even if they lie but a half dozen miles in the backward; the farther ones, to the Orkneys, to John o'

Groat's, to Skye, the island of mist and of Prince Charlie and Dr.

Johnson and Fiona McLeod, and vast numbers of places known to those who seek beauty only.