The Lost Pibroch, and other Sheiling Stories

“Master,” he cried, ‘it’s the old story, – I must be taking the road for it; here’s no rest for John Fine Macdonald!”

“But you’ll leave the girl,” said the captain, who saw the old fever in the man’s eyes; “I have taken a notion of her, and – ”

“So be it! let her bide.”

“I’ll marry her before the morn’s out.”

“Marry!” cried Boboon, putting back his hair from his face with a nervous hand. “You would marry a wanderer’s child?”

“Well, they’ll talk, no doubt; but she has gifts to make them forget, and she’s good enough to make a king’s woman.”

“Sir,” said Boboon, “I have but one thing to say, and that’s our own Gaelic old-word, ‘There are few lapdogs in a fox’s litter.’” The captain’s face got as red as his vest, and he had a ready hand up for an answer to Boboon, but he had mind the man was the girl’s father.

“I’ll risk it,” he said, “and you can go your wandering ways, for Betty is willing.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” said Boboon, and he went. In the hollow of the night he was hooting back like a boy at the hoolets on the slopes of Coillevraid, and at the mouth of day, in a silver wet light, he was standing on the edge of the hills that look on two lochs, his head high like a scenting deer’s. He turned him round about to all airts with his eyes from Cruachan to Cowal, and as far between Knapdale and Lorn as a wanderer has vision, and yonder, down at Kames, was the camp of his clan!

Betty his daughter left Macvicar’s Land in the morning and went to be captain’s wife, with a seat in the kirk and callers from the castle itself.

“Wait, wait,” said old Craignure, when the tale reached him, “you’ll see the fox come out on her ere long.”

But the fox was not there; it was skipping a day, as the fox will do sometimes when the day before has been good hunting. All went well with the woman till the worst that might have been the best happened, and she died with her first child. It was the year of the stunted oats, that brought poverty to Inneraora and black bread to the captain’s board; but black bread and brochan would have been the blithest of meat for him if Betty was left to share it. He took to the bottle, and left the boy to women who had no skill of wild youth.

And the child grew like a fir-tree, straight and tall, full of hot blood, swung about by whim and the moment’s fancy. For him it was ever the horse and gun, a snatched dinner and hearty, and off to the wood or hill. He got to know the inner ways of the beasts that hide in the coarse grasses and the whin; at a whistle he could coax flapping birds to come to heel. A loose vest and a naked neck for ever were marring his gentility, and his closest friends were countrymen with hard hands and the loud ready laugh.

One day it came to the captain’s mind that something must be made of this young blade, and he sent for him.

“Boy,” said he, “are you at your books?”

“No, but – but I ken a short way with the badgers,” the lad made answer.

“Did you have a lesson this morning?”

“Never a lesson,” said the lad; “I was too busy living.”

“Living, said ye?”

“Living. I was at the swimming at the Creags, and beaking in the sun on the braes above the Garron beside the march wall where the hedgehogs creep, and I am new from the shinty,” and he shook the shinty-stick in his hand.

The captain took to pondering, his chin on his hand and his elbows on the table, where a bottle and glass lay beside him.

After a bit he said, “Look ye, my son, what are ye meaning to be?”

“I’m for the sword-work,” the lad said, in a flash, his face twitching.

“I would sooner see you in hell first!” cried the captain, thumping the board till the glass rang. He had seen foreign wars himself and had a hack on the groin.

That was the first of the feud between them. They fought it dour and they fought it hard, the father for the crafts of peace and the lad for his own way, and at last one day the captain said —

“To the door, brat, and your lair with the Boboons you belong to! Faith, and your grandfather was right when he said there was never a lapdog in a fox’s litter.”

Who he came of, the lad had no notion, for the swart Macdonalds never came near the town after Boboon left it for the last time; but he put on his bonnet, and went out of the house and on to the highroad.

It was well on to winter, a brawling day, with the leaves of the Duke’s trees swishing thick and high over the thatch and through the streets of the Duke’s town. Snug stood the gables, friendly and warm, and the window-lozens winked with the light of big peat-fires within. Over the breast the seabirds yelped and crows craked without a stop, stirring about in the branches behind Macvicar’s Land. And the salt wind! It blew in from the low bay at one end of the town and through it to the other, and before it went a lad into the wide world that starts at the factor’s corner.

“By the shore-side to the low country, or by the woods to the hills?” the lad asked himself. He had the caman still in his hand, and he tossed it in the air. “Bas for the highway, cas for the low,” said he. The shinty fell bos, and our hero took to it for the highway to the north. He swithered at the Arches, and looked back on the front of the town and the quay with the oil-lights on it. He was half in the humour to bide, but he put the notion behind him and stretched to the brae, whistling a piper’s march. At the head of the brae the town houses were lost to him, and this so soon he could not put up with, so he went down on a way to the right a little and stood on the grass of the Winterton field.

Fast and dark the night was falling, a heavy smirr of rain was drooking the grass, and the trees on every hand shook the water in blobs from the branches. Through them the lights of the finest town in the world shone damp and woe-begone.

“There are good folk in’t, and bad folk in’t,” said the lad to himself; “but somehow ‘twas never the place for me!”

He turned and went into the road through the wood, savage at heart, without a thought of where his sleep would be. When he came to Kennachregan, there was the scad of a fire above the trees beside the roaring river, and he went down and looked over a march dyke at a band of wanderers under the trees. Young and old, men and women, they lay steaming on soft beds of springy spruce-branches with their toes to the crackling logs, snoring as snore sound sleepers, sheltered from the rain by the thick branches, the side of the hill, and here and there a canvas covering. There was but one of them up – a long old man with lank jaws and black eyes – John Fine Macdonald. He was stirring up the logs with the shod of a crutch and humming a Perth song, and before the hottest of the fire a plucked bird was roasting.

The smell of the meat and the wood-fire rose to the dykeside where the lad stood shivering in his wet clothes, and the comfort of the camp was something he could not pass by.

He took a jump over the dyke and went out in the light of the fire, wondering what would be his welcome. Old Boboon looked up with his hand over his eyes, then rose on his crutches and put a hand on the young fellow’s shoulder.

“You’re from Inneraora town?” said he.

“I am,” said the lad; “but it’s Inneraora no more for me.”

“Ho! ho!” laughed the old wanderer. “Sit ye down, ye scamp, and take your fingers to a pick of your grandfather’s hen. Boboon’s children may be slow and far, but home’s aye home to them!”

THE FELL SERGEANT

IT is ill enough to have to die in Glenaora at any season, but to get the word for travelling from it on yon trip in the spring of the year is hard indeed. The gug-gug will halloo in your ears to bid you bide a wee and see the red of the heather creep on Tom-an-dearc; the soft and sap-scented winds will come in at the open door, and you will mind, maybe, of a day long-off and lost when you pulled the copper leaves of the bursting oak and tossed them among a girl’s hair. Oh! the long days and the strong days! They will come back to you like the curious bit in a tune that is vexatious and sweet, and not for words or a set thought. You will think of the lambs on the slopes, of the birds tearing through the thousand ways in the woods, of the magic hollows in below the thick-sown pines, of the burns, deep at the bottom of eas and corri, spilling like gold on a stair. And then, it may be, Solomon Carrier’s cart goes by to the town, the first time since the drifts went off the high road; you hear the clatter of the iron shoes, and your mind will go with him to the throng street where the folks are so kind and so free.

But to turn your back for the last at that time on Lecknamban must come sorest of all. For Lecknamban has seven sheilings hidden in its hills, where the grass is long and juicy, and five burns that are aye on the giggle like girls at a wedding, and the Aora daunders down in front of the knowe, full of fish for the Duke alone, but bonny for earl or caird.

It was in this same glen, in this same Lecknamban, in the spring of a year, a woman was at her end. She was a woman up in years but not old, a black Bana-Mhuileach who had seen pleasant things and trials like all who come to this queer market-place; but now when the time was come to take the long road with no convoy, only the good times were in her recollection. And though Glenaora was not her calf-country (for she came but a year ago to bide with a friend), she was swear’t to turn heel on a place so cosy.

She sat propped up in a box-bed, on pillows, with her face to the open door, and the friendly airs of the country-side came in to stir her hair. With them came scents of the red earth and the grass, birch-tree and myrtle, from the moor. But more than all they brought her who was at her end a keen craving for one more summer of the grand world. Strong in her make and dour at the giving-in, she kept talking of the world’s affairs and foolishness to the folk about her who were waiting the Almighty’s will and the coming of the stretching-board. Her fingers picked without a stop at the woolly bits of the blankets, and her eyes were on as much of the knowe below the house as she could see out at the open door. It was yellow at the foot with flowers, and here and there was a spot of blue from the cuckoo-brogue.

“Women, women,” she said with short breaths, “I’m thinking aye, when I see the flowers, of a man that came from these parts to Duart. He sang ‘Mo Nighean Dubh’ in a style was never heard before in our place, and he once brought me the scented cuckoo-brogues from Aora.”

Said the goodwife, “Aoirig, poor woman, it is not the hour for ancient old sgeuls; be thinking of a canny going.”

“Going! it was aye going with me,” said the woman in the bed. “And it was aye going when things were at their best and I was the keener for them.”

“It’s the way of God, my dear, ochanie!” said one of the two Tullich sisters, putting a little salt in a plate for-the coming business.

“O God! it’s the hard way, indeed. And I’m not so old as you by two or three clippings.”

“Peace, Aoirig, heart; you had your own merry times, and that’s as much as most of us have claim to.”

“Merry times! merry times!” said Aoirig, humped among the bedding, her mind wandering.

Curls of the peat-reek coiled from the floor among the cabars or through the hole in the roof; a lamb ran by the door bleating for its mother, and the whistling of an uiseag high over the grass where his nest lay ran out to a thin thread of song. The sound of it troubled the dying woman, and she asked her friends to shut the door. Now and again Maisie would put a wet cloth to her lips and dry the death-sweat from her face. The goodwife was throng among chests and presses looking for sheets, shrouds, and dead-caps.