The Standard Bearer

“Neither Hob nor yet David shall get the chance; I will go myself,” cried I, firing at the notion that my two brothers could carry out such a commission better than I. “If you, Anna, will look to the sheep, I will leave Ashie and Gray behind to help you.”

“I will indeed gladly stay and see that all is kept in due order,” said Anna, and I knew that she was as good a herd as any one, and that when she undertook a thing she would surely perform it.

So I took leave of my sister, and she gave me some pieces of barley bread and also a few savoury crumblings she had discovered in the pocket which was swung on the outside of her short kirtle.

“I will not go with you; I want to stay with this nice great girl, or else go home to my mother!” cried the imperious little maid, stamping her foot and shaking her yellow curls vehemently as if she cherished a spite against me.

“Your mother has been obliged to go home without you,” I said, “but she has left word that you are to come with me, and I will take you home.”

“I do not believe it; you are nothing but a little, ragged, silly boy,” she answered, shaking her finger contemptuously at me.

I appealed to Anna.

“Is it not so?” I said.

Anna turned gently to little Mary Gordon.

“Go with him, childie,” she said; “your mother was compelled to go away and leave you. My brother will bring you safe. Quintin is a good lad and will take great care of you. Let him take you home, will you not?”

And the child looked long up into the deep, untroubled brown eyes of Anna, my sister, and was vanquished.

“I will go with the boy anywhere if you bid me,” she said.

(Note and Addition by me, Hob MacClellan,Elder Brother of the Writer.)

It chances that I, Hob MacClellan, have come into possession of the papers of Quintin, my brother, and also of many interesting documents that belonged to him. In time I shall leave them to his son Quintin, but ere they pass out of my hands it is laid upon me that I insert sundry observes upon them for the better understanding of what Quintin hath written.

For this brother of mine, whom for love I served forty years as a thirled labourer serves for his meat, whom I kept from a thousand dangers, whom I guided as a mother doth a bairn that learns to walk, holding it by the coaties behind – this Quintin whose fame is in all Scotland was a man too wrapt and godly to be well able to take care of the things of the moment, and all his life needed one to be in tendance upon him, and to see that all went forward as it ought.

My mother and his, a shrewd woman of the borderside stock, Elliot her name, used often to say, “Hob, keep a firm catch o’ Quintin. For though he may stir up the world and have the care of all the churches, yet like a bairn he needs one to draw tight the buckle of his trews, and see that he goes not to preach in the habit in which he rose from bed!”

So it came about that I, having no clearness as to leaving him to himself, abode mostly near him, keeping the door of his chamber, as it were, on all the great occasions of his life. And Quintin my brother, though we differed ofttimes, ever paid me in love and the bond of an unbroken brotherhood. Also what he had I had, hand and siller, bite or sup, poverty and riches. I tilled his glebe. I brought home his kye and milked them. I stood at his back in the day of calamity. I was his groom when first he married so strangely. Yet through all I abode plain dour Hob MacClellan, to all the parish and wider far – the “minister’s brother!”

And there are folk who have held me stupid because that ordinarily I found little to say, or dull in that I mixed not with their pothouse jollity, or proud because I could be better company to myself than a score of clattering fools.

Not that I despised the friendly converse in the green loaning when a man meets a man, or a man a bonny lass, nor yet the merry meeting about the ingle in the heartsome forenights, for I own that at one time my mind lay greatly that way.

I have loved good sound jocund mirth all my days; aye, and often learned that which proved of great advantage at such times, just because folk had no fear, but would speak freely before me. Whereas, so soon as Quintin came in, there passed a hush over every face and a silence of constraint fell upon them, as if he had fetched the two tables of stone with all the Ten Commandments upon them in his coat-tail pocket.

Now, though I hold to it that there never was a man in the world like our Quintin, at least, never since Richard Cameron was put down in red-running blood on the Moss of Ayr, yet I am free to admit that Quintin often saw things without that saving salt of humour which would have given him so much easier a tramp through the whins and thickets of life.

But this could not be. Quintin had by nature mother-wit enough, but he ever took things too hardly, and let them press upon his spirit when he had better have been on the ice at the channel-stanes than on his knees in his closet. At least that is my thought of it.

For some men see the upper side of human affairs, and some the under. But few there be who see both sides of things. And if any of the doctrines for which our Quintin fought seemed to me as the thin wind-clouds streaked like mare’s tails high in the lift, the heartsome mirth and country gif-gaf,[2 - Gif-gaf, i. e., give and take, the interchange of pleasantry, parry of wit, the cut-and-thrust encounter of tongues, innocent enough but often rough.] which ofttimes made my heart cheerier, appeared to him but as the crackling of thorns under a pot.

And so when it shall be that this wondrous narrative of my brother Quintin’s life (for it is both wondrous and true) is finally set forth for the edification of men and women, I recommend whoever has the perusal of it to read over also my few chapters of observes, that he may understand the true inwardness of the narrative and, as it were, the ingates as well as the outgates of it.

Now, for instance, there is this matter of the killing of the man upon the hill. Quintin hath written all his story, yet never said in three words that the man was not Muckle Sandy Gordon, the father of the little lass. He was, in fact, the son of one Edgar of Milnthird, and reported a clever lad at his trade, which was that of a saddler in Dumfries. He had in his time great fights with the devil, who beset him roaring like a lion in the caves of Crichope and other wild glens. But this John Edgar would always vanquish him till he put on the red coat of Rob Grier of Lag, that noted persecutor. And so the poor lad got a settling shot through the back even as Quintin has written.

And, again, when Quintin says that it was the memory of that day which set him marching to Edinburgh with me at his elbow, to hold Clavers and his troop of Lairds and Highlandmen in order – well, in my opinion we both marched to Edinburgh because my father bade us. And at that time even Quintin did not disobey his father, though I will say that, having the soft side of my mother, he got more of his own way even from a bairn than is good for any one.

CHAPTER V

I CONSTRUCT A RAFT

[The Narrative is again from the MS. of Quintin MacClellan.]

It was growing dusk when Mary Gordon and I came to the edge of the lake. Now, Loch Ken, though a narrow and winding piece of water, and more the extension of the river than, as it were, a lake of set intent, has yet many broad, still stretches and unexpected inlets, where it is a paradise for children to play. And these I knew like the way to our well at Ardarroch.

As Anna had foretold, we found upon the white sands neither the Lady of Earlstoun, nor yet the boat in which Mary and she had come from the head of the loch. We saw, however, the rut which the prow of the boat had made in taking the pebbles, and the large stone to which it had been fastened was there. The shingle also was displaced, and all about were deeply marked footprints like those made by men who bear a heavy burden.

Then, when I had sat down on a boulder by the water’s edge, I drew the little maid to my knee, and told her that I must take her home to find her mother. And also that because the Earlstoun was a long way off, she must let me carry her sometimes when she grew weary.

“Is that what Anna would wish?” she asked, for from the first she had called my sister nothing else.

I told her that it was, and immediately she put her hand in mine, yet not willingly nor yet trustingly as she had done to Anna, but rather with an air of protest and like one who does an irksome but necessary duty.

At the point of the loch at which we had arrived the trees crept down the hillside quite to the edge of the water, so that for the first quarter of a mile Mary Gordon and I proceeded northwards without ever needing to show ourselves out in the open.

Then there comes the narrow pass between the steepest crags of the Bennan and the water’s edge. We had been moving cautiously through the trees, and were indeed just about to emerge from the brushwood, when a rotten stick cracked beneath my foot. Instantly a soldier’s challenge rang sharply out in front of us.

“Halt! Who goes there?”

Though little better than bairns Mary Gordon and I cowered with the instinctive craft born of years of persecution and concealment. Again the man cried, “Show yourselves there, or I fire!”

But as we lay still as death behind the tree he did not think it necessary to enter the wood – where, indeed, for all he knew a score of armed and desperate Whigs might have been in hiding.

Then we could hear his neighbours hail him from the next post and ask what the matter was.

“I heard a noise in the wood,” he returned, gruffly enough.

“A wandering pig or a goat from the hill!” cried his comrade higher up, cheerily. “There are many of them about.” But the man in front of us was sullen and did not reply.

“Sulky dog!” cried the man who had spoken – as it were, in order to close the conversation pleasantly.

The sound of his voice caused me to stop and reflect.

The hail of the second soldier had come distinctly from the rocks of the Bennan, therefore their commander had established a cordon of sentries in order to prevent the escape of some noted fugitive. What chance was there for a couple of children to pass the guarded line? By myself I might, indeed, have managed. I could well enough have rushed across the line when the sentry was at the extreme point of his beat, and risked a bullet as I plunged into the next belt of woodland; but, cumbered with the care of a maiden of tender years, this was impossible.

The night had drawn down into a cool, pleasant darkness. Softly Mary Gordon and I withdrew, taking care that no more rotten sticks should snap beneath our feet. For I knew that in the present state of the sentry’s temper we would certainly not escape so easily.

Presently, at the southern verge of the straggling copse of hazel, and therefore close to the edge of the lake, we came upon a couple of sheepfolds. One of these belonged to our own farm of Ardarroch, and the other to our kindly neighbour, John Fullerton of the Bennan.

“I am tired – take me home. You promised to take me home!”

The little maid’s voice was full of pitifulness and tears as she found herself going further and further from the house of Earlstoun.

“We cannot pass that way – the soldier men would shoot us,” I answered her with truth.