Читать книгу The New Road - Munro Neil - Страница 9

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Ninian’s notion was to save some miles of walking round Loch Tulla by a kind of ferry which he knew could always be procured across it at the middle, where there was a boatman’s hut upon the other side that could be signalled. This ferry, hitherto upon his missions through Breadalbane, never failed him, and when they reached the loch and stood below its fir-trees they could see the hut was reeking and the boat was on the shore. The day was warm, and they were not in haste; they sat upon a knoll of berries, ate with them their bread and cheese, and only now and then would shout and whistle to the other side. The wind had fallen and the loch was like a glass, with every tree and every blade of grass reflected. Red deer were moving on the shoulders of the lower hills, which Ninian thought a thing portending change of weather, though the heavens looked as if they never more would frown—so blue, so clear, with only rolling clouds like drifts of snow upon the edges. The corries of the mountains sent a sound of running waters; the red-pine tops, as old as Scotland, bent above them, hushed and dark; the air was heavy with the tang of myrtle and of heath. From where they sat there was no sign of human life in all the country they could see, except the smoking house upon the other shore, and the man who once came out of it upon their whistling and went in again.

“No doubt it’s very pleasant this,” said Ninian, “but the boat is what I’m wanting, and I never saw a boat more dour. I’m sure he saw us!”

They fired a pistol; waited twenty minutes longer; then they made a smoke with withered bracken and some greenwood twigs. The reek rose like a pillar in the air, and more than once they saw the ferryman come out and look at it, but still he never made a move to come across for them.

“Now isn’t that the caird!” cried Ninian, amazed. “Just laziness! Pure laziness! Even for the money he will not take oars for’t! There is nothing for it but for us to go about the end of the loch, and that’s a great vexation, for there’s a river there I never had a line on, and I didna want to venture near it,—it’s a great temptation.”

“You can shut your eyes when you’re passing it,” said Æneas, jocular, as they took their packs again.

“And what would my ears be for but hearing her go gluck-gluck?” said Ninian.

It took them nigh an hour to walk around the loch and reach the neighbourhood of the reluctant ferry. Although it lay far below their track along the shoulder of the hills, so furious was Ninian that he must go down and storm upon its tenant—a fellow with a sullen eye, a falling lip, and little conversation.

“I heard you, and I saw your smoke,” he admitted, “but my boat is like a sieve; she had been staved since I took over peats a month ago, and put her on a craig in stormy weather.”

Ninian without a word walked down to where the boat was lying, and came back more furious than ever, for it was as hale as Haco’s galley.

The man scratched his head at this discovery of his lies, and then at last informed them he had acted on commands. He had been told he was to give no help to two long-coated men who would reach the loch that afternoon and likely want the ferry. But more than that he would not say. The source of his instructions he would not reveal. “All I know,” he said, “is that the coats of the both of ye are long.”

“It was the man who passed upon a horse some hours ago gave you your orders, I’m aware,” said Ninian at last, and though the man denied it, it was plainly true.

“I don’t like the look of things one bit,” was Ninian’s confession when they left the fellow. “There’s something in the air. I don’t like yon one galloping past without one word in his head for you, nor I don’t like this brose-brained, sulky fellow and his story of commands. ‘Long-tailed coats,’ quo’ he. In faith they have the measure of us! in a place like this our coats fair cry out ‘Inveraray’! But I must have a skirt to hide my hilt; a claymore swinging plainly at my hurdies would look ridiculous in a Messenger-at-Arms, and still I darena march without Grey Colin.”

He hung, uncertain, on the track they had reached again, and looked ahead upon it with suspicion and distaste. At last he fairly turned upon his heel, and said the horseman’s way was not the way for them.

“There’s miles and miles of it,” said he, “upon the edge of Rannoch Moor, the bleakest place in Albyn, if it wasna for the fishing, and we couldna move a yard but what the world would see us. There’s not the shelter of a berry bush upon it.”

“What are ye frightened for?” asked Æneas.

“I’m a man that never yet was frightened,” Ninian cried stoutly, “but I have my calling to consider. If I’m to be of any use at all on this affair I’m out on I must not be too kenspeckle in my movements. Forbye, I’m not at ease at all about your horseman, and I’m wishing that you had not all that money on you. There is not a corrie opening on the moor that might not have a band of ruffians in it, though I say’t who shouldna, since the country is, or was, my own—Macgregors, and it’s just a bit too soon for me to start disputing: that’s a thing perhaps I’ll have to do in earnest nearer Corryarrick. Now I’m thinking this is not the way we will go at all; we’ll make, instead, up Shiraside and past Loch Dochard through a pass that’s yonder namely for its goats, and down upon Glen Etive. About the dark we should be close on Buachaille Etive and the inn I mentioned. Whether we stop there for the night or slumber in the heather like our fathers, who were men, will be a thing to settle when we see what like the place is. Didst ever lie on heather, lad? and waken in the mist of morning with the plover whistling?”

“I would not mind a bit,” said Æneas, quite hearty, and the other smiled.

“I’m all for beds myself,” said he. “That’s age and wisdom. I’ve lain too often on the hill and a devil of a root below my middle, but it may be that we’ll have to couch among the deer this night. Anyway, it is a crooked road we’re going—crooked as the fool’s furrow and he at ploughing. Let us be going, merry, light, and tuneful.”

And so it was with them; they turned and went gay-hearted to the west for miles beside a stream which Ninian all the way looked at with longing, whistling to himself as if to keep his feet from lagging. It was an old drove track from Appin; something like a score of low black houses belching peat-smoke from their doors were in a swampy plain on which high peaks that Ninian had a name for frowned. They skirted past a mile-long loch where seagulls screamed and ravens croaked among some stunted thickets of the rowan; then left the water-side, and going north, went up a corrie where a stream came pouring down as white as milk. High parts they reached, and at the highest, where it seemed a world of barren mounts, the weather changed. Black clouds came from the west, and thunder rumbled on a peak that Ninian called Stob Gabhar. Before the rain came down upon them they could see into Glen Etive, lying green below them; they could hear its stream.

And then it was, as they were on the summit of the pass and looking down, they saw a strange appearance. It was a human figure, naked to the skin, and running hard across a hollow of the glen.

“The devil’s in it if that is not a fellow stark!” cried Ninian, astonished.

They watched him for a little, but the thunder broke upon them, and the rain came on so thick it drew a veil across the prospect. It looked as if they occupied the very nesting-place of storms; each peak and corrie cried; the lightning stabbed; the slopes they stood on seemed to shiver.

Drenched now in every stitch of them, they dropped down hurriedly upon Glen Etive, and were hardly at the level when the sun came out again and every pebble glinted. When they had reached about the place where they had seen the naked figure, there was sitting eating bread composedly beside a well, a man in dark-blue flannel clothing even to the kilt. A great flat bonnet with a tuft of heather on it cocked upon his head; he tugged it down upon his brow at sight of Ninian and Æneas coming down the hill.

“You’re sitting, good man, behind the wind and before the sun and beaking of yourself,” said Ninian to him gaily, and looked round about, and there was neither house nor ember, tree nor bush for shelter to a wren. “What now are you, if a body dare to ask?”

“I am,” said the man with the bonnet, as he fidged himself, “a hunter of wandering game, and it but scanty in this quarter.”

“That’s what I was thinking to myself,” said Ninian blithely. “Are you going west?”

Long the fellow thought upon this question, and said at last his way was through the Lairig Eilde.

“And where do you come from?” said Ninian. “We, ourselves, are from the Bridge of Orchy.”

“I came from a good bit off,” the other said, with eyes upon the hills, and very short and dry.

They sat a while together on a stone beside the well and talked of hunting and of marriage, till the man said he would have to go, and up he got upon his feet and took his leave.

“Good journeying to you!” said Ninian, and clapped him friendly on the back. They sat beside the well a little longer, and watched him cross the glen and pass into a hollow on the other side. They lost him for a while, and then they saw him running like a deer upon a knoll.

“He’s in a hurry, yon one!” Æneas said; and Ninian, who had all the time been pondering, began to put some questions to him. Had he noticed that the man was of Clan Tyre, judging by his garters and his heather badge? That he had no gun with him and could not therefore be a-hunting? That he was curious about the route they meant to follow and reserved about his own? None of these things had struck Æneas, and Ninian began to mock him.

“That’s the worst of schooling,” he declared; “it spoils the eyesight. Pity on ye if ye were by yourself and me not thinking for ye! Your blindness would make a stirk laugh!—oh no! ye need not bristle at me, little hero; the scolding of friends and the peace of enemies are two things not to be regarded. But ye never said a word about the naked man?”

“No,” said Æneas, “I left that to you, and I thought you had your reason for not mentioning it.”

“Good!” cried Ninian; “I’m pleased to find ye had that much in ye! Did ye notice anything more than I have mentioned in this curious hunter that goes hunting without a gun? The clothes that he has on him are as dry’s a peat, and look at us, all dripping!”

“Impossible!” cried Æneas. “There’s not a place in sight where he could shelter, and the ground is soaked.”

“That’s just the bit!” said Ninian. “There’s not a place here he could put his head below, and still he’s dry’s a whistle. I clapped him on the back to make it certain. That’s the very gentleman we saw a while ago when we were on the hill and he the way his mother saw him first.”

He got up from the stone he sat on and went searching round about the hollow, and came at last upon a boulder with a hole below it where a man might pack his clothes.

“There,” said he, “is where our friend made certain of his dryness,” and he plucked out from the hole a bunch of shelisters with which the naked man had closed his curious wardrobe.

“It’s a strange way to keep dry,” said Æneas.

“Indeed and it would not do every place,” said Ninian. “There are only two things in the world a man would take the trouble for in Gaeldom, and one of them is going to see a lass. But that man from Glen Strae—for now I ken the cut of him and whence he came—is on the hunt for neither deer nor maiden.”

“You are very sure of it!” said Æneas.

“He is a married man: you’ll mind I asked him. The other reason that a man would have for stripping to keep dry ye would not think of for a month, for all your Latin, and still it’s almost just the same as going to court a lass. It’s self-respect. No man could carry himself courageously before a girl or an important gentleman if he was seeping-wet the way we are ourselves, and yon one skipping over to Glen Coe is after business where he wants to look his best. I’m doubting, Æneas, they’re on my track already.”

Æneas now could think of half a score of other things that might account for the uncivil horseman and the disappointment of the ferry, but a likelier explanation of the MacIntyre’s stripping than the one now given him by Ninian fairly beat him. And Ninian backed it up with many arguments. It was not altogether vanity which made him think himself conspicuous in Breadalbane, nor the cause of some anxiety to lawless folk upon its borders. As beachdair for Argyll he had many times made visitations to the neighbourhood they now were in, and always followed up by some vexatious check or levy from the law at Inveraray. It might be that the object of his going to the North was guessed, and they were drawing close upon some glens where troubles often hatched: he had his own suspicions that the Camerons and Macdonalds had a hand in these assaults upon the Road.

“You and your money,” said he, “would maybe be much better trudging through the country by yourselves without my reputation tacked to them, but now we’ve started we will have to stick together. One thing’s plain in all these gentry turning up in such a desperate hurry to get on before us, and that is that the best way for us is aye the back way, and the moon our lamp.”

It was a lonely valley that they went through for another hour or two; at dusk they stood below the Herdsman of the Etive and in the only dwelling on the river-side they heard a woman singing.

“That’s the change-house,” Ninian said, “and there’s meat and music in it, as the fox said when he ate the bagpipes.”

The tavern crouched, low-eaved and black, beside a pack-horse bridge on Rannoch edge, and not another light except its own in all the evening. When they went in, they found its only tenant seemed to be the sweetest, jaunty, russet girl at baking, singing at “Crodh Chailein” with a voice to put the birds to trees.

“You are far too merry on it; you should marry,” said Ninian to her, throwing down his poke.

“God of Grace!” she cried, “are you Macgregor Campbell?”

Ninian ducked his head as if a shot were passing over him.

“It has been so suspected sometimes,” he made answer. “But the name, brave girl, is not for shouting in a change. What’s of me that was once Macgregor now is in the mist and best forgotten. Ask them in Balwhidder! I did not think that you would ken me. You are John Maclaren’s daughter, peace be with him!”

“Yes,” she said, “I am John Maclaren’s daughter, and you and I will not fall out together in a hurry, for my father liked you well. I saw you last time when I was a lump of a girl, and it was at a wedding in Glen Lyon. Weren’t we merry yonder, ochanie! And you are the last man I would like to see in these parts with your friend—this comely fellow—for there’s people looking for you.”

“I said it!” cried Ninian.

“This very afternoon, a man called Niall Roy from Succoth passed here on a horse and stopped for meat. Some men from Kinlochrannoch were about, and he got to the talking with them. His talk was all about two gentlemen, and one of them yourself by name. They went away together on the moor, the horse between them, and I did not like their friendship, not one bit! I knew that they were studying something. And I said to my mother, who is now gone to her bed, ‘It will be well for Ninian Campbell to be not about when Niall Roy of Succoth and these men are on the moor.’ ”

“Niall Roy!” said Ninian. “Now that is droll! I never did the man an injury. What way did he set out, a ghalaid!”

“They went,” she said, “along the Cruach on the track that is on the hillside yonder.”

“Fair wind to them on that line then!” said Ninian contentedly, and put his bit of salmon out for her. He then went out of doors and looked about the house and smelt the evening wind and listened.

The girl began to lay a table, with a smiling face, for Æneas. “What will you have for supper?” she inquired, and her voice, he thought, was sweeter than the thrush.

“I am starving,” he told her. “Not a bite to speak of since the morning at the Bridge of Orchy. There is fish for broiling, but I want some meat. If you will give to me a steak so thick,”—he showed the thickness on a finger,—“not too fat nor yet too lean, well beat and tender; not cooked too sore and yet not lukewarm at the middle; well spiced and salted——”

She burst out laughing. “O my young heart and it broken!” cried she. “It’s not food you want at all but feasting. If there was a miraculous steak like that to be had in all Breadalbane you would not get it, for I would eat it myself.”

“Treasure of all women of the world,” said Æneas, “I will take whatever you will give me and eat it with a relish if you will only look at me while I am at it,” and he warmed himself before a fire of peats on which she had the girdle swung for baking.

“Now are you not the bold one!” said the girl, her teeth like new-born lambs, her eyes all dancing wickedly. “Your mother must have been a pretty woman. Will you kiss me?” But she ran away and woke her mother as she said it.

They fed like soldiers, cracking blithely with the women, and at the end of eating and of talk, “I want to lay my head,” said Ninian, “where I’ll find it in the morning; where will we be sleeping?”

They took them to the best room of the house, and Æneas heard a door-bar run in channels of the masonry, a murmuring from Ninian in a bed across the room, the scream of birds upon the moor, and that was all.

His head was hardly on the pillow when he was asleep.