The Goose Girl and Other Stories (21 page)

‘You will be wanting to speak to my father,' said John.

‘Let me go to him alone. I want neither your escort, nor my own men. I shall go by myself, and put myself between his hands.—Hey, hey! Lindsay!'

He shouted to his subaltern, who came at a quick, awkward pace, intent on prompt obedience yet trying hard to look at ease, and Glenlyon said, ‘Let me present my lieutenant, Tam Lindsay. There is another of the same name, whom you will meet presently. And now, cousin, if you will confer with my brace of Lindsays about the billeting of the men, I shall go and offer my respect and duty to Maclan.'

‘Shall I not come with you?' asked John.

‘In a glen so friendly as this, a man can walk alone.—A dram before I go?'

John refused, and Glenlyon, putting the flask to his mouth, swallowed twice and said, ‘We can suffer a Dutch king so long as he lets us drink French brandy.' Then, cocking his bonnet, walked with a lilting swagger that denied his years towards Maclan's house.

Maclan stood by the door in trews and belted plaid, but bareheaded and unarmed. At either end of the house were women, anxious of look, some wringing their hands and quietly weeping, others standing dour and truculent; and in the background were little groups of rough-clad men with sword at side and targes hanging from their left arms, who stood as suspicious and quick to move as red deer on the hill.
Glenlyon, unperturbed, walked jauntily towards Maclan, and when a couple of yards from him swept off his bonnet, lightly bowed, and cheerfully exclaimed, ‘Hail to the house and household! Good day to you, Maclan. I am here as a suppliant for hospitality, knowing you have never yet denied it.'

‘I am told,' said Maclan, ‘that you bring a hundred soldiers to enforce hospitality.'

‘A hundred and twenty—and all dependent on your good will.'

Glenlyon repeated his explanation of their presence, and Maclan, as John had done, replied, ‘Colonel Hill has been a good friend to us.'

‘A good friend, also, to me and my poor red-coats,' said Glenlyon. ‘There is nowhere else he could have found for us billets as warm and comfortable as your glen can offer, nor company so kind and cheerful.'

Maclan, who had been almost inert in his anxiety—who had sat in his chair like an old man defeated by the enmity and rubs of time—had roused at once when he was told that the soldiers were already in his glen. His spirit came back when the enemy appeared, and now, before the door of his house (his head above the lintel) he confronted Glenlyon with the monumental dignity of his great stature, and with the assurance of an ancient bravery face to face with all it could lose, and contemptuous of loss. But, simultaneously, with the wary mind of a chieftain whose clan depended on his wits as well as on his strength.

‘We are all in the King's peace,' he said. ‘I have taken the oath, and the paper went to the Council in Edinburgh.'

‘That I know as well as you,' said Glenlyon. ‘I have had a word or two with John about it, and there is no breath of trouble between us.'

Maclan, huge and silent, looked gravely at him, and Glenlyon pulled on his bonnet. ‘The evening wind blows shrewdly,' he said, ‘and I am not so warmly thatched as I used to be.'

Maclan's expression changed. Solicitude showed on his face, and concern for a guest. ‘You will be tired,' he said. ‘Come in. Come in and take bite and sup with me. Enemies we may have been in the past, but if you speak truly now, and come seeking hospitality, we must be friends for all that.'

He stood aside, and Glenlyon, stooping under the low doorway, went in to a darkness lighted only by a fire of dry, black peat that gave out no smoke. But Maclan called loudly to the women of the house, and demanded candles and wine and food. They waited in silence while the women hurried to and fro, and presently there were
four candles on the round table, their flames reflected in two old, thin silver plates. Maclan's wife put down a silver platter heaped high with slices of kippered salmon, another piled with oat-bread, a china plate of cheese—no butter at this time of year—and glasses, and two flasks of wine.

They sat, and Glenlyon said, ‘It's true, as I have been told, that this is as rich a glen as can be found in all the west.'

‘No, no,' said Maclan, pouring wine. ‘We are a poor people, living only by God's grace, and that on the very ledge of extremity.'

‘By God's grace and your own dexterity,' said Glenlyon.

‘We have much to be thankful for,' said Maclan, and put three or four pieces of kippered salmon on Glenlyon's plate.

‘With salmon from the river and your own abundance of mutton, there's no danger of starvation here.'

‘There are worse places for pasture. I have a score or two of sheep, and a few cattle too. But that is all.'

‘You couldn't feed heavy horses in the glen?'

‘No, no. There is no feed for a heavy horse. Only the Highland garron can survive the hard life here.'

‘So the six English mares that Coll Keppoch took from my fields did you no good?' asked Glenlyon.

‘Now when would that be?' asked Maclan.

‘Three years ago—a little more than three.'

‘That I cannot remember. I once had an English mare—it would be about three years ago—that a friend left here, in payment of a debt—it may have been Coll Keppoch, indeed—but she lived no time at all. There was no winter feed for her, and never again would I try to keep an English horse. You can be assured of that, Glenlyon.'

‘Indeed I am, Maclan. I am fully assured.—But your judgment of Bordeaux is also good. This is as good a wine as I have ever drunk in the Highlands.'

‘Fill up your glass, there is no lack of wine, thank God. All in my house is yours—and let us think no more of English mares and the mistakes we all have made in the past.'

‘I say damn the past, Maclan, and damn the future too! Let us live within the confines of a day, like butterflies that come out on a summer morning, or the disciples of Jesus Christ, if they did as they were told.—Your very good health, Maclan!'

Some three or four hours later Maclan was put to bed by his wife and two elderly cousins who lived in the house: thickset women with mournful eyes and high, chattering voices; and when they had
undressed him, he, for a moment recapturing the solemn sense of his importance in the family, stood upright in his shirt and invoked on them the blessing of Almighty God before he fell senseless on his pillow. Glenlyon was carried to the billet he had chosen, at Achnacon, by two of the wild-seeming clansmen who had watched his arrival with swords ready to their hands—small, tough, long-haired, wild-cat-like fellows—and now bore him gently to his couch with perfect sympathy for a gentleman's habit and his helpless condition. He slept in his clothes, but early in the morning he was out and about, with blood-shot eyes and the snow-bright light shining on his cracked and varnished but well shaved chin.

He watched Sergeant Barber drilling his company, and walked briskly by their ranks to call attention to an ill-fitting uniform or some small failure to clean a musket thoroughly. He took pleasure in watching a line wheel right or left, to offer a presumptive flank, and with the pertinacity of an artist insisted that the movement be repeated until quick performance and perfect symmetry were achieved as if by nature.

After an hour's drill the company would be dismissed to a meal of porridge and dried fish; and paraded again to rehearse more elaborate movements. In perfection of discipline lay the army's only hope of defeating the superior forces of continental monarchies, or the exuberance of a Highland charge, and Glenlyon, like a gambler seeking always the perfect hand of cards, was indefatigable in his pursuit of perfection in drill. His two subalterns were of small help, but Sergeant Barber believed as firmly in drill as the most rigorous of the Children of Israel in the Decalogue; and in the isolation of its new training-ground their detachment of Argyll's Regiment grew daily more vigorously exact in the handling of arms, more precise and strict in movement.

Glenlyon, who preserved a vestige of sensibility under his varnished skin, was sometimes embarrassed and inclined to tetchiness by the constant attendance of the women and children of the glen; who watched with admiration the manoeuvring of his company, and often cheered its smarter evolutions. But Sergeant Barber accepted such attention as a reasonable and proper tribute to his power of command.

Nearly every afternoon there were games of shinty on the level fields. The low ground was frozen but bare of snow, and shinty was a game that, at its most severe, could draw blood. The stick that was used was bevelled on either side, to loft the ball with both a forehand and a backhand drive, and the ball was a solid sphere carved from bog-oak
that flew like a cannon-ball when hard hit. But because it was a game no injury was accounted base in motive, and the wildest charges were accepted as the necessary tactics of the game. All the young men of the glen were players and most of the soldiers.

The troops who had followed Glenlyon came, for the most part, from Campbell country, and a good many, who lived about Glen Orchy, Loch Awe, and Loch Fyne were near neighbours of Maclan's people; they had no difficulty in understanding each other, their speech was the same and their habit of life identical. The Lowlanders in the regiment—about a score of them—were at some disadvantage, but their fellow-soldiers and their hosts both made much of them, as if to assure them that their inferiority was superficial, and counted for nothing; and they could grumble among themselves and be comforted by the example of Sergeant Barber, whose command of the Gaelic tongue was limited and barbaric, but whose command of men was whole and undisputed.

Within a few days of their arrival, the red-coats became part of the little community of Glencoe, and their hosts, having quickly forgotten their initial fear, were lavish in their hospitality and frankly pleased to have guests whose talk and tales abated the long dullness of winter. The soldiers were pleased—as soldiers always are—to be under independent command, and remote from the over-crowded, exacting discipline of Fort William, where senior officers went to and fro in the thunderous atmosphere that gods and colonels gather round them. The soldiers' pleasure was, moreover, much enhanced by the better rations they drew in Glencoe: their hosts had been told the billeting-allowance they would be paid, but not a woman in the glen counted the cost of the dried fish and mutton hams they put before their guests. The glen indeed was richer than many a Lowland parish, with salmon out of the river and the loch hanging from cottage rafters, and cattle—not all of them bred at home—that had to be killed for lack of winter feed, and sometimes an old stag or a young hind brought down from the hill; though the deer in the neighbourhood were not many. It was not the Highland way to count the cost of entertainment, and many a meal-chest would be empty long before the spring brought grass and milk to fatten the children again, and new-run fish to replenish vacant larders.

But what was wealth except for spending, and who would balance security against the pleasures that strangers brought, who could sing new songs in the mother-tongue, and tell old stories of their common ancestry in the heroic past, and dance so featly, and take their turn at the chanter or the harp?

There were
ceilidhs
every night, and the Campbell soldiers who wore the King's red coat discovered a natural fellowship with the little Maclan sept of Clan Donald, their immemorial enemies. In the last light of short winter days they played at shinty, they wrestled, they threw the hammer and competed with the caber and the shot: they lived together like contending cousins, and when night fell they sang and danced on the beaten floors of the warm and smoky cabins in which they slept.

Sergeant Barber, much respected for his manifest authority and expert discipline on the parade-ground, went from house to house, drank more than his share, and won the Highlanders' generous applause for singing in a sweet tenor voice the bawdy, common songs of London, that no one but himself could understand, but whose tunes were noted and remembered.

Glenlyon and the two Lindsays played cards and drank every night with John and Alastair, Maclan's sons, and with the tacksman of Inverrigan and him of Achnacon. They drank, without stint, the wine and spirits that their hosts put on the table, and Glenlyon, who was a gentleman by instinct though rarely in behaviour, brought down from Inverlochy a butt of claret and some great stone pigs of whisky. Glenlyon, in the two weeks he spent in the glen, never went sober to bed, and none of Maclan's folk who sat with him was any better.

For two weeks, within a day or so, nothing happened to spoil amity, nothing roughened the placid air of jollity and contentment. A matter of sentiment and a soldier's claim to have seen the wolf that had frightened Red Angus's son, were topics of conversation: there was nothing graver.

Shiona, the daughter of John, had attracted the eyes and stirred the heart of a young man of decent family in Argyll's Regiment. He was known as Ian Og of the Bield, and was heir to a few acres at the southern corner of Loch Awe. There were other flirtations and light moments of affection between soldiers and girls of the glen, but this attachment was conspicuous because both parties to it were persons of some consequence, and the sentiment that bound them appeared to be earnest and conclusive. They were warned, and reproved, and threatened—by Shiona's mother, by Ian Og's commanding officer—but they were indifferent to opinion. Ian Og stood on his dignity, Shiona was defiant, and they went their own way within a cat's cradle of gossip entwining about them.

The other topic, inimical to quietude, was the wolf. The man who claimed to have seen it was one of the Lowland soldiers. He, having explained that he did not care to play shinty, said he had started to
climb the mountain south of Loch Triachtan—for no better reason than a fanciful notion that the glen with its steep sides was a sort of prison, in which he felt unhappy and confined—and having lost his way on the hill, and been benighted, he was frightened by a great beast in the snow, with yellow glaring eyes. He ran from it, fell fifty feet into a heavy drift—or so he said—and blind luck brought him down to the loch again. His story was not much believed; but it woke remembrance of the tale Red Angus's son had told, and like the mutter of a coming storm a whisper of fear went to and fro among the women.