“I’m at the Coillebhraid silver-mines,” said he. “We had a little too much drink, or these MacLachlan gentlemen and I had never come to variance.”
The Marquis gloomed at the speaker and brought down his fist with a bang on the table before him.
“Damn those silver-mines!” said he; “they breed more trouble in this town of mine than I’m willing to thole. If they put a penny in my purse it might not be so irksome, but they plague me sleeping and waking, and I’m not a plack the richer. If it were not to give my poor cousin, John Splendid, a chance of a living and occupation for his wits, I would drown them out with the water of Cromalt Burn.”
The witness gave a little laugh, and ducking his head oddly like one taking liberties with a master, said, “We’re a drouthy set, my lord, at the mines, and I wouldn’t be saying but what we might drink them dry again of a morning, if we had been into town the night before.”
His lordship cut short his sour smile at the man’s fancy, and bade the officers on with the case.
“You have heard the proof,” he said to the jury when it came to his turn to charge them. “Are they guilty, or not? If the question was put to me I should say the Laird of MacLachlan, arrant Papist! should keep his men at home to Mass on the other side of the loch instead of loosing them on honest, or middling honest, Campbells, for the strict virtue of these Coillebhraid miners is what I am not going to guarantee.”
Of course the fellows were found guilty—one of stabbing, the other of art and part—for MacLachlan was no friend of MacCailein Mor, and as little friend to the merchant burghers of Inneraora, for he had the poor taste to buy his shop provand from the Lamont towns of Low Cowal.
“A more unfriendly man to the Laird of MacLachlan might be for hanging you on the gibbet at the town-head,” said his lordship to the prisoners, spraying ink-sand idly on the clean page of a statute-book as he spoke; “but our three trees upbye are leased just now to other tenants—Badenoch hawks a trifle worse than yourselves, and more deserving.”
The men looked stupidly about them, knowing not one word of his lordship’s English, and he was always a man who disdained to converse much in Erse. He looked a little cruelly at them and went on.
“Perhaps clipping your lugs might be the bonniest way of showing you what we think of such on-goings in honest Inneraora; or getting the Doomster to bastinado you up and down the street But we’ll try what a fortnight in the Tolbooth may do to amend your visiting manners. Take them away, officers.”
“Abair moran taing—say ‘many thanks’ to his lordship,” whispered one of the red-coat halberdiers in the ear of the bigger of the two prisoners. I could hear the command distinctly where I sat, well back in the court, and so no doubt could Gillesbeg Gruamach, but he was used to such obsequious foolishness and he made no dissent or comment.
“Taing! taing!” said one spokesman of the two MacLachlans in his hurried Cowal Gaelic, and his neighbour, echoing him word for word in the comic fashion they have in these parts; “Taing! taing! I never louted to the horseman that rode over me yet, and I would be ill-advised to start with the Gruamach one!”
The man’s face flushed up as he spoke. It’s a thing I’ve noticed about our own poor Gaelic men: speaking before them in English or Scots, their hollow look and aloofness would give one the notion that they lacked sense and sparkle; take the muddiest-looking among them and challenge him in his own tongue, and you’ll find his face fill with wit and understanding.
I was preparing to leave the court-room, having many people to call on in Inneraora, and had turned with my two friends to the door, when a fellow brushed in past us—a Highlander, I could see, but in trews—and he made to go forward into the body of the court, as if to speak to his lordship, now leaning forward in a cheerful conversation with the Provost of the burgh, a sonsy gentleman in a peruke and figured waistcoat.
“Who is he, this bold fellow?” I asked one of my friends, pausing with a foot on the door-step, a little surprised at the want of reverence to MacCailein in the man’s bearing.
“Iain Aluinn—John Splendid,” said my friend. We were talking in the Gaelic, and he made a jocular remark there is no English for. Then he added, “A poor cousin of the Marquis, a M’Iver Campbell (on the wrong side), with little schooling, but some wit and gentlemanly parts. He has gone through two fortunes in black cattle, fought some fighting here and there, and now he manages the silver-mines so adroitly that Gillesbeg Gruamach is ever on the brink of getting a big fortune, but never done launching out a little one instead to keep the place going. A decent soul the Splendid! throughither a bit, and better at promise than performance, but at the core as good as gold, and a fellow you would never weary of though you tramped with him in a thousand glens. We call him Splendid, not for his looks but for his style.”
The object of my friend’s description was speaking into the ear of MacCailein Mor by this time, and the Marquis’s face showed his tale was interesting, to say the least of it.
We waited no more, but went out into the street I was barely two closes off from the Tolbooth when a messenger came running after me, sent by the Marquis, who asked if I would oblige greatly by waiting till he made up on me. I went back, and met his lordship with his kinsman and mine-manager coming out of the court-room together into the lobby that divided the place from the street.
“Oh, Elrigmore!” said the Marquis, in an offhand jovial and equal way; “I thought you would like to meet my cousin here—M’Iver of the Barbreck; something of a soldier like yourself, who has seen service in Lowland wars.”
“In the Scots Brigade, sir?” I asked M’lver, eyeing him with greater interest than ever. He was my senior by about a dozen years seemingly, a neat, well-built fellow, clean-shaven, a little over the middle height, carrying a rattan in his hand, though he had a small sword tucked under the skirt of his coat.
“With Lumsden’s regiment,” he said. “His lordship here has been telling me you have just come home from the field.”
“But last night. I took the liberty while Inneraora was snoring. You were before my day in foreign service, and yet I thought I knew by repute every Campbell that ever fought for the hard-won dollars of Gustavus even before my day. There were not so many of them from the West Country.”
“I trailed a pike privately,” laughed M’lver, “and for the honour of Clan Diarmaid I took the name Munro. My cousin here cares to have none of his immediate relatives make a living by steel at any rank less than a cornal’s, or a major’s at the very lowest Frankfort, and Landsberg, and the stark field of Leipzig were the last I saw of foreign battles, and the God’s truth is they were my bellyful. I like a bit splore, but give it to me in our old style, with the tartan instead of buff, and the target for breastplate and taslets. I came home sick of wars.”
“Our friend does himself injustice, my dear Elrigmore,” said Argile, smiling; “he came home against his will, I have no doubt, and I know he brought back with him a musketoon bullet in the hip, that couped him by the heels down in Glassary for six months.”
“The result,” M’Iver hurried to exclaim, but putting out his breast with a touch of vanity, “of a private rencontre, an affair of my own with a Reay gentleman, and not to be laid to my credit as part of the war’s scaith at all.”
“You conducted your duello in odd style under Lums-den, surely,” said I, “if you fought with powder and ball instead of steel, which is more of a Highlander’s weapon to my way of thinking. All our affairs in the Reay battalion were with claymore—sometimes with targe, sometimes wanting.”
“This was a particular business of our own,” laughed John Splendid (as I may go on to call M’lver, for it was the name he got oftenest behind and before in Argile). “It was less a trial of valour than a wager about which had the better skill with the musket. If I got the bullet in my groin, I at least showed the Mackay gentleman in question that an Argile man could handle arquebus