The Goose Girl and Other Stories (23 page)

They went eastward through the glen, for forty minutes or more; and Drummond, halting them, held a hand to his ear. ‘What tune is that?' he asked. ‘Who's playing there?'

Through the driving snow, but thin and faint and far away, came the braggart melody of a pipe-tune; and Drummond's half dozen looked at each other with secret knowledge. It was a tune they knew, for they had heard it in the glen. It was a march called
Glenlyon's Mares
that Red Angus the piper—the gifted singer of mouth-music—had composed in honour of the raid on Glenlyon's lands three years before. And now
Red Angus, in mad delight for his escape, was mocking his enemies from far up the mountain with the scorn of his wild music.

‘This way,' said Drummond, cocking his ear to the tune, and led them up hill. They had gone half a mile when they heard a thinner, fretful, complaining air; and Drummond, impatient for the major quarry, said, ‘There's a woman with her child not far away. Tucked in a hole somewhere. Go, you'—he pointed to Ian Og—'and let both of them sign your sword. There's no quarter given here.'

He watched Ian Og go in quest of the crying child, and led his remaining men in pursuit of the scornful piper. Ian Og climbed a ledge of rock, crossed a patch of frozen bog, and came to a slope of smooth snow at the top of which, under a great uprearing rock, he found Shiona, distracted, and the child screaming on her lap.

He knelt beside her, and took her and the child in his arms. They wept on each other's cheeks, and kissed through cold tears. The desperation of love was secondary to the desperation of their circumstance, and the passion of their tenderness quickly became urgent enquiry of their needs.—She knew, said Shiona, where her father was going. She had been bewildered by a sudden thickening of the storm, but now she knew her way and how to follow him. She complained only of the cold, and her baby's hunger.

Ian Og unwrapped his plaid and made an enclosing nest for the child. He had a day's ration of oat-bread and mutton ham, and a small flask of whisky. He gave a scrap of mutton to the child, the rest to Shiona. The child sucked the smoked meat, and was quiet. Ian Og, still on his knees, turned to Shiona, crouched under the rock, and pledged himself to meet her before summer in the house of a cousin she named, who lived by the shore in Appin. They kissed again, desperate and loving in the whiteness of the storm—but their lips parted when a snarling voice astonished them.

It was a snarl of greed, it was wild eyes flashing in a grey mask flecked with snow, and Ian Og, on his knees, reached quickly for his naked sword and swung a short cut that lopped from the leaping wolf—a wolf crazed with winter, gnawing hunger, and the warm smell of a child—his near fore-leg, and dropped him, limp and bleeding, to the snow.

With hunger more desperate than its pain, the wolf leapt again, fierce but lop-sided, and Ian Og thrust at its throat. He pricked; and the wolf crouched, snarling at him. Ian Og advanced a foot, the wolf rose on three legs—blood dripping on the snow—and Ian, back-handed, cut down and cut so hard that his sword sank from its right ear deep into the wolf's brain.
‘Here is my warrant,' he said, pointing to the blood on his blade. ‘I was told to kill a woman and her crying child, and I have killed a wolf instead. I do not think they will smell the difference of its blood—and a few months from now we shall meet again between Appin and the sea. But this I must preserve—it is my evidence.'

He knelt again, holding high his blood-stained sword, and kissed her closely. The child, still sucking smoked mutton, was quiet and contented in Ian's plaid on the snow.

‘Do not wait,' he said, ‘but go now, and I will see to it that Drummond and his men go another way.'

She took a bite or two of oat-bread and meat, a mouthful of whisky, and picked up the child. Doubly mantled, with Ian's plaid as well as her own, she went on her way, as confident now as a mountain sheep that must only hurry to regain the flock; and Ian Og, in shirt and trews, stood and waved to her. Then, light-hearted, leaping like a boy at play, ran through the snow to the path where he had left Drummond and his five soldiers when they went in pursuit of a wild piper.

He met them, returning. They had come to a cliff that seemed unscalable, and in sullen anger had withdrawn. He showed his blood-red blade and said, ‘There was no trouble. No trouble at all. Two strokes and it was done.'

‘I would like to have given forty strokes to that damned insolent piper,' said Drummond. ‘But where is your plaid?'

‘I covered their faces,' said Ian Og. ‘It was only decent to do that.'

‘A piece of damned Highland nonsense,' said Drummond. ‘But yours is the loss, it was your plaid.' And with impatient steps led them back to the glen.

Against a background of charred and smouldering cabins, they found Glenlyon, staggering a little. ‘No trophies of the chase?' he asked.

‘Nothing,' said Drummond, ‘but frustration and a damned urgent thirst.'

‘That is the whole tale of man's endeavour,' said Glenlyon; and in the light of the low sun that now shone through a small and disparate descent of snow, his varnished face looked like an old picture, painted by a master, but dusty and cracked by neglect after many years in the attic of an abandoned house.

The soldiers, idly picking in the ruins, wandered about the burnt clachan. They, being innocent, had discarded their masks without difficulty, without consciousness of what they were doing. They had resumed their common appearance. They were again lumpy, sullen,
jocular or mild, or frank and healthy. They looked themselves again. They were not to blame, and with perfect ease they had put off, and promptly forgotten, the masks they had worn for a night of alien purpose.

Six

For a week there had been rain every day. A drizzle of rain falling from a covered sky to wet fields. The air was mild, and in woods and gardens, in hedgerow and meadow, growth was luxuriant. But the bloom of spring had gone, and now it seemed as if all the southern part of England swam in a green haze. Under a sky without colour the whole landscape was a drenched and monotonous green tumbled sea. Church towers and steeples, white cottages and castle walls, rose mournfully above the verdant flood, and soured by too much green the inhabitants of town and village were in a liverish, cantankerous, and complaining mood.

Among their rulers there were those who had greater reason for ill humour, and vented it in reprobation of misdeeds they would have condoned if their outcome had been more fortunate. There was wide-spread anger against Breadalbane and the Master of Stair for their part in the tragical affair of Glencoe: righteous anger, and anger that was self-righteous. The King was too honest to deny his own share of responsibility, but too much shaken by public opinion and the failure of their plot to conceal his anger. It was anger that grew neither from moral shame nor a hypocritical intention to exculpate himself, but from a statesman's realisation that he had been badly advised and was guilty of a grave political mistake.

The rebuilding of Kensington Palace had begun, but for the last few days, under constant rain, little had been done, and from the tall window in the Master's room William looked out, with a green reflection on his pale cheeks, at a lawn divided by raw trenches and a pile of white scaffolding under the dripping shade of exuberant elms.

Nervously, with irritable movement, he returned to his seat at the long table, where a disarray of documents was spread, and confronted the two noblemen who stood, uneasy but intransigent, to hear his judgment. They wore, all three of them, their masks of purpose: on the King the royal purpose of his singular authority, and on Breadalbane and the Master the more subtle and complex purpose of maintaining, under the King's rule, their own dominion, and of justifying themselves and all they had done.

‘You have failed me,' said the King. ‘You have doubly failed me, in
tactics and policy. You did not, as you promised, destroy Maclan and his people, and you have not, by example of your strictness, suppressed dissension in Scotland. You have, on the contrary, infected England with doubt and disapproval of our rule. I, in my fashion—a king's fashion, who loses as much by disapproval of his policy as a Highland chief by the loss of half his men—have suffered more heavily than the Highlanders, though you killed Maclan and thirty others.'

‘All military operations,' said the Master, ‘are ultimately dependent on two factors, that none but God Almighty can control. The first is the weather; the second is the character and ability of the officers in command—'

‘It may be true that God ordained a snowstorm lasting three days: I do not know enough of God and his Privy Council to deny that possibility,' said the King. ‘But who chose the officers to execute our purpose in whatever weather might befall? You did. And with what effect? Of Maclan and his clan not more than thirty were killed, some of them children, and what was done was done so ill-advisedly that from all parts of my kingdom come murmurings and mutterings, and I am in bad odour as well as you, who deserve it more.'

‘With all respect, Sir,' said Breadalbane, ‘you do not know the difficulty of warfare in the Highlands—'

‘This was not warfare,' said the King. ‘Had it been war I would have directed it myself: to a better end! This was only the punishment—or intended punishment—of a small sect of rebels who, because by general repute they were habitual thieves and raiders as well as rebels, deserved no mercy. A small and simple operation—and still you bungled it.'

‘It was a punitive measure, Sir, that required the skill and artifice of military practice,' said Breadalbane. ‘And you, Sir, have never seen the Highlands. You do not know that a winter snow-storm there could defeat the plans of the greatest military genius who ever lived.'

‘The greater part of Maclan's people escaped westward into Appin. The passes to Appin were not guarded. Why not?'

‘It was thought that none could cross them—'

‘Then your appreciation was wrong, your judgment at fault!'

The Master intervened. ‘It was due to the storm, Sir, that Duncanson's detachment, from Fort William, was late in arrival. Had they been there in time—'

‘Hamilton waited for twelve days before sending Duncanson into the glen. What was the reason for that delay?'

‘He was waiting, Sir, until the others, who had to close the southern passes, and the passes to Rannock, should come in.'

‘And who was responsible for their slowness? By God, sirs, this whole affair throws up a stink of ineptitude, with another stench that I can detect, of possible corruption—'

‘No, Sir! There was no corruption, no double-dealing. All was honestly done.'

‘Then stark incompetence is your only last excuse! Incompetence in the choice of men, in the handling of men, in the framing of a plan—all that piled on top of incompetence of judgment. For you told me this was the way to pacify the Highlands, and so far from that being effected, you have inflamed, not only the Highlands, but opinion here in England, and in France. Look at these letters, these journals. See what the
Gazette of Paris
has to say about it.'

‘All these stories,' said Breadalbane sturdily, ‘have been put about by persistent Jacobites, the rump of resistance that can't be kicked out. They seek every chance to discredit your Majesty's government and its policy.'

‘And now,' said the King, ‘they have found a very good chance, and are making unholy use of it. And who gave them the chance? We did. You, my lord, and you, Mr Secretary, and I who, by the displeasure of God, am your King. We are all to blame—and I am deeply to blame for my lack of judgment in taking your advice.'

Breadalbane stood in a hardihood of controlled anger that showed a surface of resistance almost metallic in its texture—as if he were a statue of himself cast roughly in bronze—and said, ‘We have killed Maclan and thirty of his following. The old dog-fox is dead and his clan scattered, their houses level with the ground. So much good we have done, and every robber-clan in the Highlands now knows the strength of our intention and the weight of our hands. What I deplore—what we deplore, the Master and I—is that our purpose was not completed. And with regard to that, though I admit our officers were less competent than I had judged them, the main obstacle was the storm, for which we can only blame God, who is indifferent to our censure. But if all had gone well—'

‘Yes,' said the King, ‘if all had gone well, and all that pestilent clan wiped off the slate, like an old debt paid-up, we would have heard no complaint, because no one would have been left to complain; and I should not now be assailed, from England, Scotland, and France—by Jacobite dissidents, English hypocrites (always a majority) and our constant enemies abroad—for an abominable treachery that no Christian monarch can excuse, and a policy so maladroit as no government may defend!'

‘Sir,' said the Master, ‘such accusations are the commonplace of
politics, and fall away from consistency in government as waves from a well and solidly built sea-wall. Your Government is in no danger, Sir, and can easily withstand the criticism of its natural enemies. What we did was well intended, and though it has not brought about all the good we hoped, I would do it again tomorrow. We must be patient, Sir, and yield nothing to criticism.'

‘You will yield so much,' said the King, ‘as to write to Colonel—what's his name, at Fort William?'

‘Colonel Hill, Sir.'

‘Write to him, and authorise him to receive the remnant of Maclan's clan into my peace, and reinstate them in their lands, and assure them that we have no more hostile intention against them.'

‘If that is your will, Sir—'

‘It is.'

‘Then, Sir, it shall be done.'

‘But nothing we can do,' said the King, ‘will crase from the record of my reign this bloody slur you have left upon it.'