This Michaelmas my father put up a buaile-mhart, a square fold of wattle and whinstone, into which the herdsmen drove the lowing beasts at the mouth of every evening, and took turn about in watching them throughout the clear season. It was perhaps hardly needed, for indeed the men of Lochaber and Glenfalloch and the other dishonest regions around us were too busy dipping their hands in the dirty work of Montrose and his Irish major-general to have any time for their usual autumn’s recreation. But a buaile-mhart when shifted from time to time in a field is a profitable device in agriculture, and custom had made the existence of it almost a necessity to the sound slumber of our glens. There was a pleasant habit, too, of neighbours gathering at night about a fire within one of the spaces of the fold and telling tales and singing songs. Our whole West Country is full of the most wonderful stories one might seek in vain for among the world of books and scholars—of giants and dwarfs, fairies, wizards, water-horse, and sea-maiden. The most unlikely looking peasant that ever put his foot to a caschrom, the most uncouth hunter that ever paunched a deer, would tell of such histories in the most scrupulous language and with cunning regard for figure of speech. I know that nowadays, among people of esteemed cultivation in the low country and elsewhere, such a diversion might be thought a waste of time, such narratives a sign of superstition. Of that I am not so certain. The practice, if it did no more, gave wings to our most sombre hours, and put a point on the imagination. As for the superstition of the tales of ceilidh and buaile-mhart I have little to say. Perhaps the dullest among us scarce credited the giant and dwarf; but the Little Folks are yet on our topmost hills.
A doctor laughed at me once for an experience of my own at the Piper’s Knowe, on which any man, with a couchant ear close to the grass, may hear fairy tunes piped in the under-world.
“A trick of the senses,” said he.
“But I can bring you scores who have heard it!” said I.
“So they said of every miracle since time began,” said he; “it but proves the widespread folly and credulity of human nature.”
I protested I could bring him to the very spot or whistle him the very tunes; but he was busy, and wondered so sedate a man as myself could cherish so strange a delusion.
Our fold on Elrigmore was in the centre of a flat meadowland that lies above Dhu Loch, where the river winds among rush and willow-tree, a constant whisperer of love and the distant hills and the salt inevitable sea. There we would be lying under moon and star, and beside us the cattle deeply breathing all night long. To the simple tale of old, to the humble song, these circumstances gave a weight and dignity they may have wanted elsewhere. Never a teller of tale, or a singer of song so artless in that hour and mood of nature, but he hung us breathless on his every accent: we were lone inhabitants of a little space in a magic glen, and the great world outside the flicker of our fire hummed untenanted and empty through the jealous night.
It happened on a night of nights—as the saying goes—that thus we were gathered in the rushy flat of Elrigmore and our hearts easy as to reivers—for was not MacCailein scourging them over the north?—when a hint came to us of a strange end to these Lorn wars, and of the last days of the Lord of Argile. A night with a sky almost pallid, freckled with sparkling stars; a great moon with an aureole round it, rolling in the east, and the scent of fern and heather thick upon the air.
We had heard many stories, we had joined in a song or two, we had set proverb and guess and witty saying round and round, and it was the young morning when through the long grass to the fold came a band of strangers. We were their equal in numbers, whatever their mission might be, and we waited calmly where we were, to watch.
The bulk of them stood back from the pin-fold wall, and three of them came forward and put arms upon the topmost divots, so that they could look in and see the watchers gathered round the fire.
“Co tha’n sud’s an uchd air a bhuaile?” (“Who is there leaning on the fold?”) asked one of our men, with a long bow at stretch in his hands.
He got no answer from any of the three strangers, who looked ghastly eerie in their silence on the wall.
“Mar freagar sibh mise bithidh m’inthaidh aig an fhear as gile broilleach agaibh” (“My arrow’s for the whitest breast, if ye make no answer “), said my man, and there was no answer.
The string twanged, the arrow sped, and the stranger with the white breast fell—shot through her kerchief. For she was a woman of the clan they name Macaulay, children of the mist, a luckless dame that, when we rushed out to face her company, they left dying on the field.
They were the robber widows of the clan, a gang then unknown to us, but namely now through the west for their depredations when the absence of their men in battles threw them upon their own resource.
And she was the oldest of her company, a half-witted creature we grieved at slaying, but reptile in her malice, for as she lay passing, with the blood oozing to her breast, she reviled us with curses that overran each other in their hurry from her foul lips.
“Dogs! dogs!—heaven’s worst ill on ye, dogs!” she cried, a waeful spectacle, and she spat on us as we carried her beside the fire to try and staunch her wound. She had a fierce knife at her waist and would have used it had she the chance, but we removed it from her reach, and she poured a fresher, fuller stream of malediction.
Her voice at last broke and failed to a thin piping whisper, and it was then—with the sweat on her brow—she gave the hint I speak of, the hint of the war’s end and the end of MacCailein Mor.
“Wry-mouths, wry-mouths!” said she; “I see the heather above the myrtle on Lhinne-side, and MacCailein’s head on a post.”
That was all.
It is a story you will find in no books, and yet a story that has been told sometime or other by every fireside of the shire—not before the prophecy was fulfilled but after, when we were loosed from our bonded word. For there and then we took oath on steel to tell no one of the woman’s saying till the fulness of time should justify or disgrace the same.
Though I took oath on this melancholy business like the rest, there was one occasion, but a day or two after, that I almost broke my pledged word, and that to the lady who disturbed my Sunday worship and gave me so much reflection on the hunting-road. Her father, as I have said, came up often on a Saturday and supped his curds-and-cream and grew cheery over a Dutch bottle with my father, and one day, as luck had it, Betty honoured our poor doorstep. She came so far, perhaps, because our men and women were at work on the field I mention, whose second crop of grass they were airing for the winter byres—a custom brought to the glen from foreign parts, and with much to recommend it.
I had such a trepidation at her presence that I had almost fled on some poor excuse to the hill; but the Provost, who perhaps had made sundry calls in the bye-going at houses farther down the glen, and was in a mellow humour, jerked a finger over his shoulder towards the girl as she stood hesitating in the hall after a few words with my father and me, and said, “I’ve brought you a good harvester here, Colin, and she’ll give you a day’s darg for a kiss.”
I stammered a stupid comment that the wage would be well earned on so warm a day, and could have choked, the next moment, at my rusticity.
Mistress Betty coloured and bit her lip.
“Look at the hussy!” said her father again, laughing with heaving shoulders. “ ‘Where shall we go to-day on our rounds?’ said I; ‘Where but to Elrigmore,’ said she; ‘I have not seen Colin for an age!’ Yet I’ll warrant you thought the cunning jade