Читать книгу The New Road - Munro Neil - Страница 7

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The morning bell was ringing when he reached the town. Salt airs from sea were blowing through the lanes. Men at the harbour, dragging ropes, cried cheerfully. Oh, the bold, cold, hard, beautiful world! He felt like one that had come out from fever-rooms among the hearty bustle of the quay to which he went immediately to seek his uncle, who was there already at the loading of the Good Intent with timber baulks for Skye.

In half a dozen sentences he told his story, only keeping back Miss Margaret’s prank with the forbidden keys, the meeting in the dovecote, and the shameful charge against himself to which her subterfuge had made him liable. Now that it was daylight, which brings caution and cools down the ardours of the night, he saw quite clearly that the girl was much to blame, deserving of no shelter, but he would be the very last to punish her. Rather would he stay silent, suffering Duncanson’s suspicions if they went no further. The situation as presented to his uncle, too, was just in keeping with that gentleman’s predictions.

“I told ye!” he declared when Æneas reported that the tutoring was ended, and that Drimdorran had some fancy that the pupil and her tutor had, between them, planned the missing of the evening lesson; “I saw it coming! That girl a while ago was daft about ye; any one could see it in the kirk on Sundays! I would be much surprised if old Drimdorran didna notice. And that doesna fall in wi’ his plans at all; he’s set on having her for Campbell.”

“He’s welcome so far as I am concerned,” said Æneas.

“Are ye sure, man?” said his uncle. “Till last night I thought different. I didna tell your aunt nor say to you that Will’s being on the quay at the hour he should be at his tasks looked gey and curious. For he was asking about you. He said he had been sent by Margaret to meet ye here, and that I couldna fathom, seeing you were gone as usual to Drimdorran House.”

“That was some caprice of Margaret’s,” said Æneas. “She herself had shirked the lesson.”

“Ye werena with her somewhere?” said the uncle drily, and Æneas looked blank to have the very keystone of his secret tapped so soon. He did not answer.

“Man!” cried his uncle, comprehending, as he fancied, “ye have put your foot in it wi’ Sandy! I knew if ye gave him the slightest reason to think ye were trifling wi’ his girl and spoiling sport with Campbell, he would squeal. The man is fairly cankered wi’ ambeetion; all his body’s hoved wi’ vanity since he became a laird and stepped into the property that should be yours. It’s six-and-twenty years since he came here, no better than a packman, to be clerk to old Macgibbon. He played cuckoo wi’ poor Macgibbon, and secured the factorship wi’ Islay. Then he trafficked with your father, managing for him when he was off upon his silly escapades among the Jacobites, much against my will, and God be wi’ him! No one better knew than old Drimdorran what your father was conniving at in France, and in the North wi’ Glendaruel, and the damned old rogue, I’ll swear, encouraged him, well knowing what the end would be. He leased Drimdorran from your father, who could never stay at home after your mother died, and got him in his debt for loans, the size of which gave me the horrors when I saw the bills. What your father did with all that money God Almighty knows! unless, like Glendaruel, he scattered it among the disaffected clans. I couldna pay them off, whatever o’t, when your father died; I wasna then in the position. When your father’s name was plastered at the cross a rebel at the horn and outlawed—him a corp up yonder in Kintail,—I went and saw the man that he had supped and drank wi’, played the cartes and fished and worked at pigeons wi’, and he was rowtin’ like a bull about his loss. Not the loss o’ his friend, ye’ll mind! but of the money he had lent him. He staggered me by bringing out a deed in which your father pledged Drimdorran as the bond for Duncanson’s accommodations, but he doubted, by his way o’t, if the deed would hold against a property in danger of escheat for treason. Sly devil! Well he kent MacCailein could put that all right! And there he sits, this fourteen years,—a son of Para-na-muic of Gunna—the Gentleman from Coll, and bonny on the gentleman! What will please him now but that Lord Islay’s boy should get him grandsons! If it werena for Lord Islay—honest man!—ye wouldna dare have put a foot within Drimdorran’s door! And on my soul, I’m glad ye’re bye wi’ him and his; I’ve something better for ye!”

For some time past the tutoring engagement had appeared scarcely worthy of his nephew to the Bailie. Æneas, to tell the truth, was something of a disappointment to his uncle who had reared him, sent him to the college with Lord knew what object, though the Law was mentioned, and some study of the same had sent him later on to Holland, where he met with Islay. But Æneas no more regarded Law than cutting breckans; his heart was all in pictures and poetry,—very pretty things, no doubt, but scarcely with a living in them.

Many a time, since he came back, the Bailie spoke to Annabel about the possibility of giving him an interest in the business. She liked the notion well enough in some ways, but she had a hankering to keep the lad a gentleman,—a gentleman to her idea being one who lived in some ambiguous way without a shop or vulgar occupation.

“Do ye think, a’ ghalaid! I’m no gentleman?” her man would ask.

“Ah! but you’re different,” she would tell him. “Æneas, by rights, should be Drimdorran, and nae Drimdorran ever fyled his hands wi’ merchandise.”

“A sight better if they did, my dear,” said Alan-Iain-Alain Og, far sundered from his family traditions. “It was better for Paul if he had dealt in stots and queys that’s very good for folk, and profitable, rather than be scampering about the country herdin’ French recruits and breeding trouble. What did he make of it, poor man? He’s yonder in Kintail, and Duncanson, the man o’ business, sleeping in his blankets. And as for me, myself, I’m proud to be a merchant! I owe no man a penny, and your gentlemen are in my books. There’s some of the finest family gentlemen, as ye think them, canna sleep at night for thinking what I’m thinking o’ their bills, and all the time I’m sleeping sound and never bothering. It’s quite enough for me that they’re harassed.”

The sudden termination, then, of Æneas’s office gave the very opportunity the Bailie wished for. It was so opportune that the occasion of it never caused him any feeling of annoyance; at the hour of breakfast he was full of schemes for launching Æneas on a career as merchant.

The Bailie’s schemes had their dependence on the great New Road that Marshal Wade was cutting through the mountains. Hitherto the peaceful Lowland world—the machar of the Gall, the plains town-crowded, bartering with England, making money—was, in a fashion, sundered wholly from the world above the Forth. The Grampians, like ramparts, stood between two ages, one of paper, one of steel; on either side were peoples foreign to each other. Since roads had been in Scotland they had reached to Stirling, but at Stirling they had stopped, and on the castle rock the sentinel at nightfall saw the mists go down upon a distant land of bens and glens on which a cannon or a carriage wheel had never yet intruded. Only the bridle-paths to kirk and market, the drove-track on the shoulders of the hills!

Now was the furrow being made, as Ninian said, on which to drive the Gael like bridled oxen—smooth, street-wide, a soldier’s road, cut straight across the country through the thickest-populated valleys, till it reached the shores of Moray and the forts that stretched from sea to sea.

In this New Road the merchant saw his opportunity. Always to the inner parts of Inverness it had been ill to get his goods in winter time with vessels weather-bound among the isles or staggering round Cape Wrath. Now he saw a chance of opening communication by a route as safe as the King’s highway to London, and already was MacCailein talking of a branch into Argyll.

Annabel, in the nerves about her nephew’s sudden stop as tutor, that day at least got little satisfaction for her curiosity; the big grey map of Blaeu that hung in the lobby was spread out upon the table; and her husband, stretched across it like a sailor, marked the track the New Road took through country in the chart set down without a line to break its rough ferocity.

“It may be a sodger’s road,” he cried to Æneas, “but it’s just the very thing for merchant waggons. It’s true we’re off the line a bit, but I have the Red One’s word that there’s a lot of roads in view across the country, and in the meantime I could send my wintering straight from Leith to Stirling. And then what have I on the either hand of me for a hundred miles or more but the very pick o’ people—Menzies, Robertsons, Stewarts, the Athole men, Clan Chattan, and the Frasers!”

“A bonny lot!” said Annabel. “No’ a pair o’ breeks among them!”

“We’ll soon put breeks on them, the Duke and me, a’ ghalaid!” said her husband cheerily, plucking up the waistband of his trousers. “Stop you!”

“It’s not so much at first what I’ll put into them,” he said to Æneas, “it’s only meal, eight merk the eight stone boll, and salt perhaps to start with; herring maybe, and an anker now and then of brandy for the gentry, but it’s what I’ll lift from them in beef. It’s just a great big breeding-ground for stots! And look at all them Great Glen lochs and rivers—full o’ salmon! There’s a man in Inverness called Stuart has the pick just now of all their kippered fish, but I’ll be learning him!”

“The only thing,” said Æneas, “I know about it is that there’s a lot of trouble on the Road at present.” And he told of Ninian’s mission.

“Ye tell me Ninian’s going!” cried his uncle. “That is better still! My notion was to send ye round by Crieff, but what’s to hinder ye to go with him?—ye may be sure he’ll take the nearest way for it: for all that he is tainted in his name, the man’s an education.”

He dashed more heatedly than ever into Æneas’s immediate occupation. If Ninian would take Æneas in his company they might be in the North by Michaelmas, or at the very latest by St Martin’s Day, when lairds and tenantry alike were desperate for money. Æneas, in Inverness, would have the money, in buinn oir and bank notes—three hundred pounds of it, enough to make the Hielandmen run wild; the Bailie, for a wonder, had the cash that moment at his hand. Mackay, his correspondent in the town of Inverness, would give the lad an insight to the market situation, go about with him, and show him where to look for freights and either come to terms for barter or buy stuff for money down.

“Ye’ll find a lot of them will want the money,” said his uncle in the Gaelic. “Money is the boy in Gaeldom! It’s seldom that they hear the cheery chink of it.”

Chinking his coin, then, Æneas was to spend a while in bargaining for salmon crops from Beauly, timber from Glen-Moriston; if occasion offered, herring, cod, or mackerel for Spain. But what his uncle most insisted on was careful study of the Road, and what there might be in it for his trade.

It was but ruefully at first that Æneas spent that morning with the map and Alan-Iain-Alain Og’s commercial dreams. It seemed to him a sad come-down in life from Cæsar and the bards, but what was he to do? He looked across his uncle’s back, and through the window, at the seagulls swooping in the wind above the ferry, and felt that what was here proposed was shackles for the spirit, mean engagements.

But one word of the Bailie’s cleared away his vapours, and it was the word Adventure.

“It’s just a bit of an adventure,” said the Bailie. “That’s the thing wi’ me in business, otherwise it wasna worth a docken leaf!”

At that word Æneas took another look at Blaeu, and there at last he saw the marvel of the North as Blaeu had figured it—the mountains heaped like billows of the sea, the ranging bens, the glens with rivers coiling in them; great inland lochs and forests. He saw high-sounding names like Athole, Badenoch, and Brae Lochaber, Lorn and Spey; they moved him like a story. All his days had they been known to him, but mistily and more as things of fable than of actual nature—lands of the fancy only, like the lands of Ossian, figuring in winter songs and tales of old revenge.

Now, to his uncle’s great astonishment, he leapt on Blaeu, and with his chest upon the parts he knew, he peered, transported, on that legendary region of the boisterous clans, still in the state of ancient Gaul, and with Gaul’s customs. The very names of castles, passes, straths, misspelled, entranced him: everything was strange and beckoning. Moreover, it had been the country of his father’s wanderings, somewhere there his father had been slain, somewhere there was buried. The reflection shook him.

“Where does it lie,” he asked in his mother tongue, “the place of my father’s changing? I do not see its name.” And someway all at once he felt the climate of his mind had altered, and the North was plucking at his bosom.

The other answered solemnly. “Of what blood art thou, young Angus, that cannot hear the name cry grievously upon the paper! There it is—Kintail! Black be the end of that Kintail that finished him!” Not the merchant spoke but kinship; on the forehead of Macmaster swept the dark cloud of undying hate. His visage was convulsed; he smote upon the map; he seemed that moment like a man a million miles remote from the world of ledgers.

“Dear me!” cried Annabel, “ye shouldna swear like that before a lady, even in the Gaelic.”

“I wasna swearing, m’eudail,” he assured her, scarcely cooling. “I was only speaking of my brother Paul.” He turned again to Æneas. “I’m not forgetting, mind,” says he, with bitterness. “For me the claymore’s by wi’t, but I’m fighting wi’ MacCailein. These blackguards in the North brought out your father—the very men I’m selling meal and wine to; many a time I wish to heaven it would choke them! Do you think it’s what I make of it in siller that’s the pleasure of my trading wi’ the North? If it was only siller I would never seek to sell an ounce beyond Loch Fyne. Na! na! there’s more than that in it—I’m smashing them, the very men that led my brother Paul astray. MacCailein and me! MacCailein and me! And now there’s Marshal Wade and his bonny Road that’s going to make the North a land for decent folk to live in! I have the bills o’ men like Keppoch and Glengarry flourishing about the Lowlands in the place o’ paper money; they’re aye gettin’ a’ the dreicher at the payin’, but whatever comes o’t I have got them in my grasp. It’s no’ the common people, mind!—the poor and faithful clansmen—but their lairds and chiefs I’m after, them your father marched wi’ in his folly, blind to their self-interest, thinking they were only out for James.”

“I’ll go!” cried Æneas, almost lifted from his feet; the soul of him seemed filled with some dread pleasure.

“Of course ye’ll go! That’s what the Road’s for—you and me and vengeance. Look at it!”—with a piece of keel he drew a line from Stirling far north on the map to Lovat’s country. “That’s the Road the harrow is to go to level down the Hielands, and I have put a lot of seed in there already that is bound to come to crop. Once the New Road is finished, and the troopers and the guns and my carts on it, it’s an end to the dominion o’ the chiefs! The North, just now, might be in Africa, for all we ken about it; nobody dare venture there except wi’ arms.”

“Does the law not run there?” Æneas asked.

“Law run!” the Bailie cried with mockery. “It runs like fury—and the clansmen at its heels. Ask you Ninian! I’ll no’ say that he ever ran himsel’, but many a time he had a smart bit step for it! Of course ye’ll take a weapon, if it is nothing better than a wee Doune pistol, and at anyrate it canna be so bad upon the Road,—there’s always sodgers back and forward from the barracks.”

“It’s no’ wi’ my consent ye’re goin’, but I hope ye’ll walk wi’ caution,” said his aunt.

“Six years ago I darena send ye,” said his uncle. “Ye might lie and rot for years in Castle Dounie dungeons and nobody would ken your fate except old Simon Lovat and his warders. That’s the head and front of them—the fox! I ken him, and I’ve bought his fish—a double-dealing rogue that’s married on a decent woman, Primrose Campbell, daughter of Mamore.”

“Poor Prim!” said Annabel, “I’m vexed for her; I don’t know what on earth possessed her to take up wi’ such a man!”

“Nor I,” said the Bailie. “Nor what on earth it was that made MacCailein and Lord Islay let her marry him. That’s the sort o’ man the Road’s to put an end to; some day yet, if he is spared, ye’ll see his head upon a stob and it no’ very bonny! Mind I’m telling ye! There’s no’ a roguery in the North for forty years he hasna had a hand in—one day wi’ the Jacobites, the next day wi’ the others. Many an honest man he hanged before his windows or sent to the plantations. God knows who he has in yon bastile o’ his in irons! It’s the only quarrel that I have with Himself here that he maintains a correspondence wi’ the fellow. ‘Policy,’ says MacCailein wi’ a cough, but any one that plays at politics wi’ Lovat has a tarry stick to hold. And still, were it not for Simon’s runners coming here wi’ letters for Himself so often, we would ken no more about what’s happening in the shire of Inverness than if it was Jerusalem, though every messenger he sends, as Ninian tells me, is as sly’s himself. Far is the cry to Castle Dounie, and it’s steep on Corryarrick! Not a whisper will come over Corryarrick that he doesna want. But the Road’s going over Corryarrick, and the end of Sim’s at hand, and of his kind! Perhaps when it is finished we will hear what happened Lady Grange; since she was lifted near a twelvemonth since in Edinburgh nobody has found her whereabouts, and Lovat gets the blame for her trepanning. I wouldna put it past him! He’s a dirty brock!”

The tutor’s stipend came that afternoon to him from Duncanson, and with it came a little scrape of letter that confirmed his liberation from an office that had all at once become repugnant. It looked as if Drimdorran meant to have a plausible excuse for his suspension; the story, later in the day, went round that Islay’s son was going to the college of St Andrews.

Æneas at once went to the Messenger-at-Arms to ask him when he meant to set out for the North.

“I’ll soon can tell ye that!” said Ninian, and showed to him a knapsack. He turned it out upon a form. It held a shirt or two, some hose, a pair of brogues, a shagreen case of razors, a pot of salve, a Bible, and a dirk. “The Bible,” he explained with gravity, “is for the thing that is within us all, but the dirk is for my own particular skin; what else would any man be needing but his wits about him and a coin or two? Have ye the nut, my hero?”

Æneas had the nut.

“And now I’m all complete!” said Ninian, quite contented.

“It would be better, would it not, with a companion?” Æneas said to him.

“Ha, ha! You may be sure I thought of that,” said Ninian, “and I’ve got him—there he is, the brave grey lad, and he not slender!” and with a movement of the haunch he brought to view the basket of a claymore, tucked away so sly below the skirts of him, its presence hitherto had been invisible.

“That’s him,” he said,—“Grey Colin, sober as a wife and sharper in the tongue.”

“I was thinking of a man with you,” said Æneas.

“Another man’s legs are no use for my travelling,” said Ninian; “I’m better with my three fine comrades—courage, sense, and foresight.”

“What I thought,” said Æneas, “was you might take me: I’m finished with the tutoring, and my uncle wants me to go North on business.”

“Oh ho!” cried Ninian, sharp-looking at him. “That’s the way the wind blows, is it? I’ll take the last thing in my mind the first, and tell ye this, that I’m the man that’s willing, if you can have your pack made up to-morrow morning. I’m starting at the skirl of day myself, but whether you’re to leave the town with me or not will have to be considered. Now for the first thing in my mind, and most important—what ails Drimdorran at ye?”

“Young Campbell’s going to St Andrews,” said Æneas uneasily, and Ninian’s eyes half shut.

He placed the plenishing of his knapsack back with some deliberation, whistling to himself the tune of “Monymusk,” then put the Molucca bean with care in a pouch he had inside his coat below his elbow, where was a small black knife; but all without a word, and Æneas felt mightily uncomfortable.

“What’s in my mind,” at last said Ninian, turning on him quickly, “is that if you’re going with me, you’ll need to be as open as the day. I’m deep enough for two of us whatever—that’s my trade, and I want nothing muffled in my comrade. Stop, stop!”—for Æneas was about to blurt the truth—“I’m asking nothing, mind! But at the very start ye try to blind me with this story of young Campbell going to St Andrews, and I’m not so easy blinded. I asked what ailed Drimdorran at ye! Last night the man was in a fury. What’s more, he never put his head to pillow, and he sent for ye this morning at an hour when gentlemen are snoring. It’s not for nothing that the falcon whistles—is he blaming ye for Margaret?”

“That’s the truth,” admitted Æneas. “I thought for her sake it was better not to mention it. But the man’s mistaken; there is nothing in it.”

“Just that!” said Ninian dryly. “Whether there is or not is none of my affair at all, at all; but it makes a difference in the way we’ll have to start for Inverness. It would never do in the circumstances for the two of us to leave this town together like a cow and a veal at her tail. Myself I’m going by Glen Aray and the Orchy. I might have tried Glen Lochy, but I want to see some salmon in a linn that’s close to Arichastlich, and forbye, I ken the folk that’s in Glenorchy—decent people though they’re no’ Macgregors! It would not hinder you, now, to start on a road of your own. It might be that you would be going to the Lowlands, like,” and he gave a wink of great significance, and stuck his tongue out in the corner of his mouth. “There’s not a finer glen in Albyn than Glen Croe, and you would, let us be saying, take the track across Glen Croe down to Loch Lomond. But you would kind of shift your mind about the Lowlands when ye got to that fine water, and start up Glen Falloch, and who would I be seeing in the evening at the Bridge of Orchy change but young Macmaster! My welcome to him, I’ll can swear, would be in grandeur and in splendour!”

“Very well; so be it!” said Æneas. “You are riding?”

“Indeed and I’m not!” said Ninian firmly. “Only to the length of Bridge of Orchy, just to show my friends upon the road I’m not a man that needs to wear shoe-leather. From there I’m sending back the horse by a man that’s coming that length with me. After that I’ll stretch out like a warrior and take my shanks to it. Ye’ll need a horse, so far, yourself, or else I’ll have to wait a day for ye.”

“I’ll take a horse to Bridge of Orchy too,” said Æneas, “and send it back or sell it as my uncle may advise.”

“You see, a horse is not much use on my affairs,” said Ninian. “It’s something like two extra pair of legs—an awkward thing to have about ye; it looks too much like business in a hurry, and I like to give the notion that I’m daundering at my ease. Ye canna hide a horse behind a bush of juniper nor take it crawling wi’ ye up a burn, and it’s aye another thing to run the risk of losing. Nothing better than the shanks, my hero! and ye’ll see a good deal more on them than cocked upon a saddle. Ye’ll need a pickle money.”

“In that I’m likely to be well enough provided,” answered Æneas. “I’ll have three hundred pound about me.”

“What!” cried Ninian. “Through Lochaber! God be about us! am I to travel wi’ a banker’s vault? Ye havena robbed Drimdorran, have ye?”

“No,” said Æneas, laughing, and explained the nature of his mission to the North.

“Not a word about it then!” said Ninian. “It’s not that stealing money is a habit with the folk we’re going among, poor bodies! They never touch a thing but bestial, and perhaps, at whiles, a web of clothing, but at this time o’ the year, wi’ Crieff Tryst comin’ on, there’s many a droll stravaiger stopping at the inns and changes we’ll be sleeping in, if sleeping’s going to be a thing we’re going to waste much time on, and a man wi’ all that money on him would be smelling like a spirit keg for their temptation.”

In the midst of their discussion, further, on the preparations for the journey, Janet entered, and at the sight of her, for Æneas the zest of the adventure flattened. It was not frosty wells she was to-day but ice itself, until her father told her Æneas was going with him, when she brightened.

“But why not all the way together?” she inquired, surprised to learn they were to take such devious ways into Breadalbane.

“Because, my lass, our friend here’s leaving not in the friendliest trim with Mr Duncanson,” said Ninian, “and I’ve no mind to vex that bonny gentleman until we have the width of two good parishes between us. He seems so little taken up, himself, with my bit jaunt on Islay’s business, that he might be glad of any excuse to put it off. And indeed, forbye, it is a splendid chance for Æneas here to see Glen Falloch. It’s a place I’m very fond of.”

“It seems a queer-like start,” she said with puzzled brows, “but anyway I’m glad my father is to have your company.” She turned upon the young man rather warmer. “You will find him,” she said, “a kind of crooked stick to take the road with on the forests and the mountain moors.”

“It’s ill to take the crook out of an old stick,” said Ninian blythly, “but sometimes it’s as good as any other for the business.”

“I hope you’ll see that he will not go wandering about too much at night; that will always be the time when I’m most anxious for this man—this wild young dad of mine.”

“And that’s the very time when I am surest of myself,” cried Ninian. “My name’s Macgregor and the fog’s my friend! I’m thinking, too, you couldna send a better man wi’ me to watch me in the night; he has that turn himsel’!” And there he gave a nudge to Æneas.

Æneas flushed before the level glance she gave him upon this.

“There’s one thing I hope,” she said, “and that is that you are not in a desperate hurry to get North or to get back again, for my father is a man who makes little speed through any country where there is a fish to catch.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Æneas, “to keep him from his angling.”

“It will be hard,” she said. “A rod and a river-side for father, and the day slips by! It is like life itself and us, poor things! at playing.”

With a breast tumultuous Æneas went home, and with the help of Annabel prepared for a departure so precipitous she almost wept about it.