Читать книгу The New Road - Munro Neil - Страница 4

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A mile of distance from Drimdorran House and from the glen, from whose tail-end it was shut off by old high woods, there was, at the time, what might be properly regarded as the strongest outpost of invasive influences which by sap and contravallation were, in God’s good providence, to destroy the ancient Highland world. Already it was shaken to its mountain roots, save in the farther North. Whole tribes, that not so long ago were ill to meddle with as any bike of wasps, were now as little to be feared as butterflies; packmen from the Lowlands sometimes travelled through the worst-reputed valleys selling specs, and ribbons. Here and there in the Garbh-chrioch—the Rugged Bounds,—and even as near at hand as on the fringes of Breadalbane, there was still an orra chief with a ferocious gang about him, struggling—unsubdued, defiant, doomed—against some force that was more hateful and alarming since so often it assumed the insubstantial shape of alien ideas, not of arms: they roved, these fellows, still, in an always lessening area, demanding for themselves a savage liberty, holding the sword as the only tool and charter fit for the duineuasail, the Gaelic gentleman, and they ever grew more desperate as they felt the squeeze of this encroaching civilisation. Beyond the confines of their native glens they knew themselves for outlaws. Their people followed them from custom, born with the conviction that the clan must stick together and go out upon the old road when Himself required: Himself, with a handful of savage virtues, made the clan the instrument of his every selfish inspiration, spoon-fed them with the flattery of blood equality, and in return extorted blind submission to his whims.

Perhaps at the spring of things no loftier motives influenced the invasion, but the assault at least was carried on with a superficial elegance, and nowhere with a more unflagging zeal than from the outpost of Argyll, settled, itself, for more than a hundred years, its capital become a Lowland town in all except the language, with a philabeg or weapon scarcely to be seen upon its causeway, save on a fair or market day. Here was the destiny of the clans decided; crafty policies inimical to lawless folk and broker men were hatched; the Duke, MacCailein Mór,—Red John of Battles, as they called him,—held the fate of Gaeldom in the hollow of his hands. He had never seen the Uist machar-lands, so fine, so sorrowful, nor even but afar the great brave peaks of Skye, but he had widely seen the world, and no one living better knew the Gaelic people. Nor more was he familiar in the flesh to the scattered folks who spoke of him in fashions roundabout—as of a man inscrutable, invisible, and to be feared, directly named as cautiously as possible, much better indicated as the “Red One,” with a fidget of the shoulder.

Even Inveraray saw but little of him; from the age of seventeen, when he was colonel, he had fought in all the wars and sieges; more than once he was the Regent in his sovereign’s absence; half his days were spent in London. And yet it was upon his flying visits to Loch Fyne that, with his brother Islay, he concerted every plan to tame the clans above the Grampians. The strings of Hanoverian policy for Gaeldom ended there, in him, and yet in manner he was simple as a child. For him and Islay (who was most at home, though also something of a wanderer), messengers and spies continually were plying through the troubled shires, in which, likewise, he filled a thousand offices with his nominees.

In island crofts and mainland clachans that knew him not but as a fabulous being, the castle of MacCailein Mór, in which they somehow learned their destinies were handled and arranged, was pictured in the people’s fireside winter ceilidhs as enormous, filled with regiments of Campbells; no other way, they thought, could he maintain the power which even their chiefs confessed. They figured him as misty and Fingalian, night and day in an iron coat, and brooding, without sleep, upon their harrying.

And the droll thing was, if they had only known it, that though he loved and mastered Gaeldom, it engaged his mind but casually when he was in its bounds; he spent himself more lavishly on greater things. Though the strings might come together in his castle, some one else was usually at their pulling—his brother Islay, Keeper of the Privy Seal, who, in his absence, left them to a man whose name was never heard outside the confines of his parish—Alexander Duncanson, Black Sandy.

Great men may plot and rule, but always there is some one inconspicuous who executes; for nine months of the year—in unvexed periods at all events—Black Sandy was as good as Duke, and ruled the Highlands, in so far as they were capable of rule, from the closet in Drimdorran House. He was, officially, MacCailein’s Baron-Bailie, also Islay’s business man or “doer,” ward of his lordship’s natural son, and private secretary; but all his neighbours knew this did not limit his authority. Had but the clansmen only guessed what common being ruled their destinies, instead of that fantastic monster they imagined; had they any proper notion of MacCailein’s castle, dark through half the winter, undefended, they would certainly have swarmed across the passes!

The castle was a keep of insignificant extent, and jostled on the shore side by the town, the smoke of which in certain winds blew in upon MacCailein’s very dinner-table. It was a burgh of no great proportions, vilely overcrowded, far too often with the tar-pot burning for its fevers, only half the houses slated, these the winter domiciles of landed gentry having dwellings elsewhere, or of thriving merchants. No rational plan was in the town’s arrangement; it lay all heads and thraws in a nook at an angle of the river and the loch, with crooked, narrow, broken lanes with all the gable-ends of the abutting buildings frontaging the thoroughfare, cold-shouldering the passers-by. In the hour of the meridian dram it did a thriving business in a score of inns or taverns; it was the briskest period of the day for this metropolis which did the best part of its work in furtive ways in writers’ chambers, since, now that steel was going out of fashion, people did their quarrelling before the Sheriff or the Lords. Near the quay, however, there were profitable booths and market-stances; the shipping trade was always growing.

Æneas’s uncle—Alan-Iain-Alain Og, as he was styled before they made him Bailie—had a store beside the quay, below his dwelling-house; although he never lowered himself to put his belly to a counter or put on a brattie, he maintained a prosperous merchant business, due in no small measure to the influence of MacCailein. Three ships he had that traded with the islands and the North, and even to the coast of France and up the Baltic; in busy seasons he kept half a dozen coopers going. From Ayrshire he bought oatmeal cargoes that were sent about the Mull to the Shire of Inverness and to the Hebrides, along with herring, salt, and timber, but the bulk of the merchandise he brought from London, Dantzic, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Cadiz, or the Mediterranean was stored and packeted at Inveraray in the sheds which smelt of lemons, spices, smoked salmon, or Archangel tar, according to the season.

“That’s right!” the Duke would say to him, with a jaunty step into the store among the coopers packing powdered sugar, tea, and hops, silk cloths, tobacco-rolls, and looking-glasses,—“that’s right, Bailie! keep tickling them with luxuries, and I’ll guarantee you’ll help to subjugate my savage Hielandmen far quicker than we’ll do it with their Watches and dragoons.”

Such was MacCailein’s humour—that the spirit of the mountains could be pacified if once the people got a taste for something more than brose and tartan; he looked upon the Bailie as a pioneer, and gave him every help to send his merchandise in safety, even to Clan Campbell’s bitterest enemies. The Duke secured for him a share of the commissariat of the garrisons at Fort William, Bernera in Glenelg, and Duart, Mull; on two or three occasions he had got for him a convoy of the troops to run a thousand bolls of meal by horse through troubled country to Kilchuimin Fort, fed usually from Inverness.

And the Bailie, too, had a kind of vanity in his part in Highland politics; he would give a chuckle when he got the bills of chiefs like Keppoch or Glengarry, all payable at Crieff, and, waving them like trophies, would say to his spouse, who was a lowland woman, “Annabel, a’ ghalaid, here’s another hem on Donald’s shroud! I’m getting all the papists in the North for customers!”

“Perhaps they’ll not can pay ye when it comes to Michaelmas!” would she say anxiously, for Annabel was never sure of any Hielandman except her own.

And there would her husband laugh at her: on Gaelic probity—for all the cattle-lifting—no small part of his business had been founded, and he knew his money would be sure at Crieff, even if the man who owed it had to seek the tryst with a hundred claymores round him.

He was a sturdy-built, broad-shouldered chunk of a man who had at one time been the champion hammer-thrower of the shire and a great hand with the gun, but that was five-and-twenty years ago. Mercantile prosperity would seem to have an ill effect upon the trunk, in which the energy and elegance of men and women mainly centre, as they say, and he was grown a little heavy and deliberate in his movements. Never again the white hare on the hill for Alan-Iain-Alain Og! Never again the mountain-tops! Himself, he was a notable example of the Highlandman as altered by the progress of the times—no spark of the adventurer nor any natural wildness left in him, as one might think to see him in the kirk; devoted to his wife and bairnless fireside, going no farther off from them than once a year to Crieff or Glasgow, all his business in the North and in the Islands being done for him by agents or his skippers. Indeed it took him all his time to handle things at Inveraray, where he was for ever on the quay at which a boat of his was certain to be warped, or in the store where he broke his bulk and made up packages.

He had been busy all that day at the unloading of a freight of cod and kipper salmon sent through his agent, Zachary Macaulay, in the Lews, by his Good Intent, a vessel of 50 tons; the work of the day was over, and he was wearily going up the outside stair to his house above the store when Æneas, with a lighter step, came up behind him.

“You’re surely early home!” said the uncle as they were passing into the house together.

“There was no evening lesson,” answered Æneas. “The young fellow was amissing and Miss Margaret——” He was on the point of saying something that he realised might lead to questioning and involve exposure of the lady’s escapade, and that, he felt, would not be fair to her, so he checked himself in the middle of his sentence.

Bailie Macmaster noticed the check in his nephew’s speech, and slyly glanced at him as he shut the outer door. Annabel had put a cruisie in the porch. No little part of Alan-Iain-Alain Og’s prosperity was due to the fact that he could put two and two together and not make five of them; he caught his nephew by the shoulder before they left the porch to go in where sat the mistress, and he said in Gaelic, which is capable of searching personal examination framed in words of no offence, “Angus, lad, art in any way concerned with yon young woman?”

“What should make you think it?” Æneas asked him.

“The thing, my shorn young lad, that made the roebuck sniff and not a hunter to be seen—a bit of a smell to windward! I never knew a man of two-over-twenty start at shaving if there was not something in the thicket. Let thou make a fool of thyself with old Drimdorran’s lass and the tune is through the fiddle! He will crush ye like a biscuit.”

“I’m as good a man as he!” said Æneas, not greatly put about.

“Indeed and ye are, and better! Sandy has not got the blood; our kin were in Drimdorran when his ancestors were feeding pigs in Coll. But that is not the bit of it! Let him get it into yon brindled head of his that ye’re like to mar his plan for getting Islay’s son for his daughter Margaret and ye’ll find it not a healthy climate here in Inveraray.”

“To the dev——”

“At thy leisure, lad!” said the Bailie, back to his English, warningly, for his nephew’s tone was getting high. “Not a word of this to herself in-by; I kent before ye mentioned it that the schooling had been off this evening; Will Campbell was on the quay and told me; that’s the reason for the roebuck sniffing.” He chuckled slyly, pinching his nephew’s arm. “Keep a dog’s bark distance from Drimdorran’s kennel, when business does not bring ye there!” and they went in together to the room where Annabel was spinning, with a supper ready on the board.

The room, lit by a girandole, had an iron grate, a glass above the chimney-brace, a wainscot table, rosewood chairs with water-tabby bottoms, and a floorcloth made of tapestry, all plenishing that marked it as the room of a thriving gentleman, for the Bailie liked to see things tosh and cosy round about him, and brought many a bit of plenishing from London in his barques: still Annabel would aye be at the spinning in the midst of all that grandeur, with the rollagan—the carded wool—in a creel beside her feet. On the top of a large ’scritoire were the books of Æneas that he had brought from Utrecht with him; they were his aunt’s delight to look at, though she could not read a word of them, as they were mainly in the Latin.

Annabel was a clever body,—geur, as her husband called her, which is sharp, and sly, and gently mocking in an Ayrshire country fashion, and implies the tartish quality which judges like in sappy Ayrshire apples. A good deal younger than her man, it was her humour to maintain a sort of playful coquetry with Æneas, as she said herself, to keep her hand in at the gallivanting. The same good madame had not altogether lost the art of it; she still could fleech and tease the laddie like a young one! Perhaps the game was not judicious, for it had one consequence she never bargained for—it made her nephew clever far too cheaply and too soon at a sport that properly should have a stiff apprenticeship, and not with aunties.

Her husband, he would laugh at her betraying all the tricks that won himself in a fortnight’s courtship down at Girvan, but sometimes he would ask her if the thing was altogether wise; there was a risk that Æneas might find this sham philandering grow stale, and all the sooner try his hand on game with uncut feathers.

“No fear o’ that!” said Annabel on these occasions; “the mair he kens o’ his auntie’s wiles the better he’s set up to come unscathed through others; it’s what I would do wi’ a son o’ my ain if I wasna a’thegither doited. Laitin doesna learn ye how to meet designin’ women.”

“Ubh! Ubh! that’s an awful character ye’re giving to your sex, mem.”

“Man! Alan, do ye think the Lord intended men to hae the whole o’ the manœuverin’?” would Annabel say, with pity smiling on him. “But ye canna say I ran after you!” she added quickly, to preserve a married woman’s last illusion.

“Oh no!” says he, “I’ll no’ say that of ye; ye just went on ahead and dragged a hook. But I’m no’ complaining, whatever.”

“And a bonny fish I caught!—a ragin’ Hielandman!” quo’ Annabel.

“All the same, a’ ghalaid! it is time ye had your draglines in. It’s my belief ye’re keepin’ up the practice wi’ some end in view, and lookin’ at your carry-on wi’ Æneas I feel I would be hooked again mysel’ if ye happened to be my widow.”

And there she would laugh at that, fair like to end herself, and tell him to put it in the Gaelic for himself and see what sense it made.

That night when Æneas and her man came in where her wheel was purring she was in a merry key. By, on the instant, went the wheel and rollagan. Never before, since Æneas had been a lodger, had he managed to get back from his evening task in time to join them at their supper; she was so pleased with this unusual experience that she never asked its reason.

Down on a stool plumped Æneas and took off his spatter-dashes. “Never mind the leggin’s i’ the now,” said she impatiently. “Sit in, my dear, and take your supper; I’m sure ye’re needin’ it.... Unless your appetite is gone,” she added, twinkling, “wi’ broodin’ on your trouble.”

“The only trouble I have,” said Æneas, “is a right sore head,”—the fusty dovecote air had made him really ache a little.

“Oh, that!” said Annabel. “Distemper! I ettled there was something wrong when I saw ye shaved this mornin’. For puppy ailments there’s naething beats the auld cure—butter and brunstane. I thought it might be something mair alarmin’. Alan, sit ye in, and pass the bannocks.”

The Bailie did as he was told, then loosened several buttons. Something in her manner told him that she was at her old pranks in a quickened spirit, and still he was bound to laugh within himself at her play-acting with the youth—the way she bobbed her ringlets, and languished on him with her eyes, and hung on his most trivial utterance. Annabel Loudoun, in her Girvan days, for a lass bred in a manse, was wonderfully acquainted with the worldly arts; in twenty years of married life she had forgotten none of them, and she was helped in them by having still a jimp and girlish figure and a dauntless grip of youth.

“Thoire an aire!—Watch thyself! she’s up to mischief!” Alan warned his nephew in the Gaelic, which they seldom spoke before her for good manners’ sake.

“There ye are!” she cried with an affected anger. “Tak’ to your savage language when ye’re plottin’, baith o’ ye, for my deceivin’.”

“Ye should have learned it then, and been upsides with us,” rallied her man.

“I had mair to do,” was her retort, “and I didna do sae badly wi’ ye wi’ my lalland Scots. A bonny pair ye are—the jeely man, for Æneas!—keepin’ me in the dark about the cairry-ons wi’ silly glaikit lassies!”

This hit so close on Æneas’s last experience that he started, whereupon she laughed with mock bitterness, and made a great pretence at wounded vanity.

“Oh!” she cried, throwing up her hands in comical resignation, “I ken fine I’m gettin’ auld: it wasna to be expected I could keep my joe. Ye needna glower, Alan, sittin’ there like a craw in the mist! I’ll have it out wi’ the young rapscallion.”

“Tuts! there’s no’ the lady in the parish I would even wi’ ye, auntie,” said the nephew. “I doubt there’s no’ another, neither, who could bake as good a scone,” and he helped himself to one of those proofs of her housewifery.

“I didna say she was a lady, did I? Just a hoyden lass ‘that’s bidin’ wi’ her daddie O!’ as the sang says. She daesna ken the schemin’ rascal that she’s ta’en the fancy for. My scones, quo’ he! I might have kent it was the press and what was in it kept ye in the house at night; it wasna Annabel Loudoun’s charms, fair fa’ them! I clean forgot ye were just a laddie till I saw ye shaved.”

That touched Æneas on the tender side of his assurance; the youth, which for her was something not to be relinquished without a gallant struggle, was for him a mortifying burden, and he reddened at her confirmation of a feeling that had lately grown upon himself. She was quick to see where she had pricked him, and at once her manner changed; there is a point where friskiness in mellow ladies becomes grotesque and pitiful, but Annabel was far too shrewd to push her humour such a length. She changed her key immediately.

“There now!” said she, “amn’t I the haiverin’ body! Just put it down to a done auld auntie’s jealousy! But I’ll say this for the lass—she might be waur; indeed she’s just the kind I would pick for mysel’ if I had breeks.”

“What’s this lass ye’re bletherin’ about?” her husband asked, surprised that so soon she should, like himself, have got upon the scent of Margaret.

“A figment of the mind,” said Æneas, smiling, though uneasy; the dovecote business was assuming more significance than ever.

“That’s what a young man’s view of any woman is if he’s fond enough,” said Annabel. “But I’m no’ gaun to say another word about your infidelity; that would be cruel to yoursel’ and hardly fair to the lass whose secret I discovered this afternoon. Your name, I can assure ye, was never mentioned, at least she never mentioned it, but every time I did, I saw her give a hotch upon her chair.”

“I wish I knew who it was!” said Æneas with resignation.

“Mercy on us, Lothario! Bluebeard!” cried Annabel. “There are so many o’ them about him that when I charge him wi’ his perfidy he canna guess the particular one I mean! Was ever such a monster! Let me tell ye this, Æneas, this one’s secret is safe wi’ your auntie Annabel; I’ll put her at no disadvantage next time that ye meet her.”

“I told ye, Æneas,” said his uncle gravely, “that the roebuck had his head up, though I didna think the hind had got the scent o’ anything.”

“There was never less excuse for sniffing, then,” said Æneas dryly. “I never changed ten words outside her father’s door with that one since I started teaching in Drimdorran—well, until to-night. And that’s the last I hope to hear of her in this connection, flattering though you may consider it to mix her name with mine, Aunt Annabel. If you want to know—the lady’s much too interested in Willie Campbell to bother her head about me.”

Annabel stared at him, astonished. “Nonsense!” she exclaimed. “I think I have my wits about me, and she sat this very afternoon on that chair you’re on, fidgetin’ at every step in the lane——”

“What, Margaret!” says he, and at that his aunt gave a gasp and began to laugh. “Ye perfect villain!” she cried, “is Maggie Duncanson a victim too? ‘Faith it wouldna be a bad way for ye to get back your father’s property—to marry Maggie; but na, na, I couldna thole Drimdorran in the family;” and not a word more, good or bad, would she say about the topic, though her husband, now curious himself, made sly attempts at drawing her.

“Who were ye talkin’ of?” he asked, when Æneas had gone out a little later, leaving them to their evening game of dambrod.

She bustled at the clearing of the table. “I’m no’ gaun to tell ye that!” said she. “If women are to have a chance at a’, they must be loyal to each other.”

“I thought at first like Æneas,” said he, “that ye were on the track o’ Margaret.”

Annabel slyly smiled. “I think,” said she, “I have spoiled her chance wi’ him, if ever she had any; there’s no’ a quirk in Margaret’s wee black heid I havena put him up to wi’ my actin’ o’ the lovesick lass. To tell the truth to ye, that was the object o’ my philanderin’ wi’ him. When he came back from Holland he was just a greenhorn; he couldna look at a short-gown dryin’ on a line but aff his hat went to it, and his face went red. Any rubbish a woman liked to utter to him he would listen to wi’ reverence. I mind o’ him wi’ Bella Vicar—she had been talkin’ some poetic nonsense to him, wi’ yon dark, eerie, Hielan’ eyes o’ hers in the proper shape to hint at a soul as deep as a loch behind them, and when she was gone says he to me, ‘There’s something fascinatin’ in that girl; I feel I could never quite understand her; wonderfu’ depth o’ character!’ ‘Heaven help me, is it Bella!’ says I. ‘Ye muckle calf! she’s just as shallow as that ashet! Yon meltin’ voice and swimmin’ e’e were a’ put on for your beguilement, and she didna understand the half o’ what ye said about your Mr Milton, though she let on she did.’ ‘A certain kind o’ mystery,’—says he, and at that I fairly lost my patience wi’ him. ‘The mystery’s all in your imagination,’ I tell’t him. ‘There’s no’ as much mystery in Bella as would keep ye gaun for a week wi’ her.’ ”

“She’s a fine, big, bouncin’ girl, whatever of it,” said the Bailie, putting out the dambrod men.

“Just that! That’s all you saw in her, you wicked monster; poor Æneas, on the ither hand, wi’ a heid fu’ o’ Laitin poetry and nae experience, saw naething but the mystery. There’s a mystery about a pig in a poke, and it’s aye the innocents that’s maist ta’en up wi’t. I saw my nephew had a lot to learn afore he could be trusted anywhere awa’ frae men and aunties and the books o’ that ’scritoire; I was just in mortal terror Maggie Duncanson would glamour him between her tasks; he was like a ripe plum ready to drop into her pinny. That’s the way I started makin’ a parade o’ tender interest in him. Losh! Alan, do you mind the fright he got at first when he thocht I maybe was in earnest!”

“I was put about to think it might be Margaret,” said the Bailie. “Everybody kens that her father has an eye on Islay’s son for her; that’s the way he clapped her in wi’ William for the lessons, though Æneas was only hired by Islay for the lad.”

“Margaret’s a very clever lass wi’ no’ much sense, and she’ll be better suited wi’ Will Campbell,” said Annabel. “But I doubt my practice wi’ him hasna made him proof against attack in other quarters; a lass was sittin’ in that very chair ye’re on, twa hours ago, and she’s the very kind to lead him on a halter made o’ snow.”