The Goose Girl and Other Stories (18 page)

He was telling the man from Appin of his desperate journey to Inveraray in the last days of the old year, to take the oath before it was too late. ‘The word,' he said ‘did not come till the year was slipping away like the last of the ebb, but I would not go till I had the word. I could not listen to the King in London till I had permission of our own King.'

He had gone first to Inverlochy, to swear his oath before Colonel Hill, the commander of the garrison; but Hill had sent him to Inveraray, to make submission to the Sheriff, the civil power; and he had started his journey in a snowstorm.

He had crossed the ferry and gone by the Appin shore in gale weather; he riding a good garron, and four gillies running beside him. The weather grew worse—none but themselves, neither beast nor human, was abroad—and when they came into Campbell country they found worse enemies than snowdrifts and the wind. They were held prisoner for a night, and then let go. But the old year died as they came to Taynuilt, still thirty miles from Inveraray, and the grim Pass of Brander between. A blizzard met them the next day, more drifts, and on Loch Awe beside them the white snow melted in the
white spindrift of the waves. It was the second day of January before they reached Inveraray, and the Sheriff, Colin of Ardkinglas, to whose clemency Colonel Hill had recommended Maclan, was not there. He had gone to stay with friends, to bring in the New Year in the proper convivial way; and not until the 5th of January did he return.

He was a kindly man, and though he thought it now beyond his authority, he at last consented to register Maclan's oath, and promised to send the papers to Edinburgh; and that was done. But since then Maclan had heard nothing, and the winter journey had so taxed his strength that what remained was no match for his anxiety. He lay back in his chair, inert and massive: a huge, heroic figure whose spirit was exhausted.

The man from Appin listened silently to the story, and muttered through bearded lips some dubious consolation. Maclan roused, and poured more wine, and saw in the candle-light the waiting boy.

‘What brings you here?' he asked.

The boy repeated, well and clearly, the story Red Angus had told. ‘And my father,' he concluded, ‘wants to know if you yourself ever saw a wolf in the glen.'

‘If the wolves are coming back, there will be worse to follow,' said the man from Appin.

‘Where did the boy see it?' asked Maclan.

His grandson told him—it was, he said, high up in the corrie that runs down to the point of Loch Triachtan—and Maclan, his eyebrows and his brush of a moustache looking behind the candles like snow-drifts on the rough, red hill of his face, answered slowly, ‘It was there that my father killed the last wolf in Glencoe. He killed three in his lifetime, and I as a boy saw the bodies of two. Twice I have seen a running wolf on the Moor of Rannoch, but never in the glen.'

‘Nor, in my lifetime, have they been seen in Appin,' said his guest with proper complacency.

‘Bid your father,' said Maclan, ‘to tell Red Angus that his son Hamish was dreaming, but to think no worse of him for that. In the deep snow, in the whiteness of the snow, even a grown man's wit can wander, and no one should believe what a boy has seen. There are no wolves in Glencoe, but before long there may be worse than wolves.'

The boy ran home, and found his father's house now full of people who had come to hear Red Angus telling stories, and singing mouth-music. To begin with, when he spoke of a wolf on the hillside, the women of the house had risen and closed in upon him like ghosts of themselves, they were so stricken with fear. Ancestral memories awoke
of yellow eyes in the dark, sharp fangs, and long slavering tongues. Of wolves in the snow, fierce with the hunger of winter. And for a little while there had been a tremulous stillness in the house.

But then Red Angus, with another mug of ale in him, had said, ‘I left the boy crying at his mother's knee, and I thought he was crying with fear of what he had seen. But perhaps he was crying for remorse, because he had thought of a fine big lie to tell, and indulged himself by telling it. There may be no wolf at all, except in his imagination—and now, if we are talking of imagination, did I ever tell you what the Cuckoo said to the Cockle on the strand? I listened to them once, and this is what the Cuckoo said . . .'

He sang a Gaelic verse in a high-pitched, bird-like voice, and the melody of the words was so closely tuned to the little, leaping air that his audience, quick to respond and with instant recognition, all felt as if spring had already come and a cuckoo was mocking them from a copse of hazels. It was about then that other people from the clachan began to come in. They had seen Red Angus on his way to John's loft-house, and thought with simple, unerring logic that there would be good entertainment if he were to spend the evening there. So a dozen or more discreetly followed him, and presently Red Angus sang a little song that imitated the harsh voice and curious conversation of a corncrake; and another whose bubbling words and lilting tune were the very likeness of a song-thrush meditating in the early dawn its mating impulse and warning other cock-birds to keep their distance.

He sang it again, and a girl cried, ‘Let us have dancing now!' There were other young people who took up her cry, and Red Angus sat down on a three-legged stool, and filling his chest with air, compressed his lips and forced from his lungs a draught of wind that carried a torrent of wild, nonsensical words which mimicked the notes and noise of a piper playing a reel for dancing. And every man in the house took his partner, and on the well-packed mud floor trod heel and toe. They danced featly and closely, in a maze of movement, a whirl of lifting feet and turning legs and waving hands. They danced with a spring and a flourish, all moving together and avoiding each other as cleverly as starlings, in a flock of starlings, turning and wheeling in the evening sky. They danced till they filled the air with smoke, though the fire in the middle of the floor had been burning, when they started, with a clear warmth out of old, black peat; and when the smoke got into Red Angus's lungs, he began to cough, and the mouth-music came to an end.

Then a daughter of the house went to her father's side, and knelt beside him, whispering close in his ear. She was a girl of eighteen or
so, whose husband had lately been killed in a brawling, unnecessary fight with some of Breadalbane's people. He may well have been in the wrong, for he was in Breadalbane's country and the bullocks he was driving may not, as he claimed, have been his own beasts that had strayed. No complaint was made against the Campbells, but his death was deeply mourned; for he had been a stalwart young man of lively temper and good natural gifts. He had left the girl Shiona with a baby two months old, and she had wept for a week; and then, being young, put memory behind her. She had always, as a child, kept close to her father, and now, kneeling beside him, she begged him to sing the song he had made about the fight at Killiecrankie.

Her father, though almost as tall and broad as Maclan himself, was a quiet and modest man. He had made the song for his own pleasure, and sung it, till now, only for the entertainment of his own family. But Shiona besought him to sing—she was a tall and lovely girl, with dancing eyes and lips of promise and full breasts—and when others clamoured too, to hear the song, her father stood and began his lay.

It started quietly. A simple recitation of the facts. There were two armies facing each other in the rocky glen through which the rushing Garry ran brown and swift. The army of the King in London, red-coated, exact in discipline, but drawn-up on lower ground. Above them, smaller in numbers, the Highland host, and the wind that flung, this way and that, the silver birches in the glen, fluttered their tartan plaids, and the music of their pipers danced and re-echoed from the rocks and sang above the burden of the river. The midsummer sun was sinking—now John's tune grew livelier—and when the sun that had dazzled the impatient eyes of the host was spilling itself on the western hills, the Highlanders, trotting like hill ponies, began their advance. The redcoats fired their volley! Now there were open spaces in the ranks, as when a winter gale blows through an old pine-forest and takes the tallest trees. But the Highlanders stood, firm of foot and clear of eye, with arm-muscles braced and muskets level, and fired an answering volley. Then, with a shout, threw down their smoking firelocks, and with broadswords flashing high, charged down-hill.

Oh, charged! Down-hill with tartans in the breeze like sails full-bellied in a gale of victory, and broadswords flashing, slashing, cutting through and asunder, breaking the serried line and driving men and horses, disciplined men and frightened horses, into the brown current of the fierce river, and voices shouting a chorus of triumph. Their enemies scattered like the winnowed chaff, and the mood of triumph filling the rocky glen like the Garry in flood—till, of a sudden, they heard the knell of hope and the tidings that filled their
hearts with desolation. For at the very top of triumph, their leader the Graham—the Graham, great lordly laughing Claverhouse himself—had been struck by an errant ball and died on the field. So victory, the whirlwind charge of Highland victory, reaped no harvest but the death of its proud commander. Great Claverhouse was dead, and victory an empty cask. . . .

They heard his song, and rewarded it with long silence; but Shiona put her arms about her father's neck and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Better Claverhouse than you,' she said. And then, as when the making tide begins to flow, in ripples leaping up the sand or runlets filling a dry channel through the rocks, they all began to talk. A story here, of Claverhouse or the fight at Cromdale. A story told, with laughter, about the redcoats. An argument, warmly debated, about Lochiel, who had gone to London and enjoyed himself at court, but suffered the King—the second James—to make a butt of him and mock his Highland ways. Lochiel, who had killed the last wolf in Lochaber! Lochiel, who had fought with an Englishman till their swords were broken, then fought with bare hands, and tumbling on the ground Lochiel had fastened his teeth in the Englishman's throat and killed him as if he had been a wolf himself. ‘The sweetest bite I ever had,' he said.—Another tale, of little modesty, about a woman whom Lochiel had met at court; and then by strange analogy the history of a cow in Glen Ure that fell in love with a red stag and took to the hills. The stories reached farther and ran deeper back in time, till the heroes of old legends, Finn and Oisin, and Deirdre of the Sorrows, and birds and seals, were rubbing shoulders with men they knew, with their own fathers, and the politicians in London. And in whatever was told they were all concerned, for all were akin. In temper and abilities they were individual and apart, but in nature they were one.

The fire burnt low and it grew cold. Again a girl called for a dance, and Red Angus made his mouth-music till his lips were dry and his throat sore with the effort. But they danced till the air was warm again.

One of the two or three good pipers of the clan had come in, who sat with John, drinking ale; and when the younger people had had enough of dancing, he stood and tuned his drones. He began to play a little indeterminate air, but soon proclaimed the notes of a pibroch for which he was famous. It was called
The Children of the Dead,
and commemorated an old clan battle in which the Maclan of his time, and most of his chosen warriors, had been killed; but the children of the next generation had grown taller and stronger than any young men who had ever played in the glen before; and because
in their childhood their mothers had sung them to sleep with prayer for reprisal and invocation to vengeance, they grew up with knowledge of their destiny. They grew into a generation of warriors, and when the time was ripe they fell upon their fathers' enemies and destroyed them utterly.—It was a long pibroch, and when it was finished some of the guests began to feel it was time to go home; and when some got up, the others followed their example.

It was, indeed, not far from the dawning of another day; and the boy, John's son, who had gone to Maclan's house to ask about wolves, was the only one in the company who felt discontented. For when he came home the house was full of singing and dancing, and everyone had forgotten the fear with which the evening began. He had had no chance to tell them, with all the authority of Maclan behind him, that no one in living memory had ever seen a wolf in the glen.

It was not till late in the following morning—not until nine o'clock or thereabout—that any movement could be seen about the houses. There was very little out-door work to be done in winter, and no one believed in the virtue of early rising for its own sake. But by ten o'clock the chimneys were smoking, and even Red Angus's wife no longer believed in the wolf that her son had met when the old ewe, for which he had searched in vain, was seen grazing contentedly with the rest of the flock. The meadow-grass that grew richly in the seaward parts of the glen was left uncut, for the most part, and when snow fell both sheep and cattle could still find some grazing in the low-lying fields by nuzzling through the snow.

The day, so late begun, was fair and still. The sun was silver-gilt, the snow unflurried by any wind. In this winter calm there was more movement than usual—a sort of holiday movement—between the several clachans, or main hamlets, of the glen. There was a cluster of dwellings about Maclan's house on the lochshore, two others on the river bank, and a fourth beyond Loch Triachtan where the glen lay narrowly between a steep mountainside to the north, and a turmoil of high hills to the south, that were called the Top of the Peaks and the Shepherds of Etive.

In sun-lit pleasure, in gossip and idleness, Maclan's people spent that calm and empty morning; and in the afternoon, succeeding this innocency of friendly visiting, the whole clan stood rooted in fear about their houses when a man came running to say that a column of red-coated soldiers was marching in from the Loch Leven ferry.