Jaunty Jock and Other Stories

III

Kincreggan is in a cleft of the mountain where the River Glas is joined by the Water of Maam, its situation chosen with cunning for that purpose it used so well to serve. For weeks after the lawyer had ludicrously cast off his coat on the highway and disposed of his trews in the planting behind his office, and was seen making for Kilree forest wrapped ingeniously in a web of tartan filched from a weaver’s waulking-wicker, Kincreggan, for all the Isles, at least, was the most interesting place in the world. People quitted work, put on their Sabbath clothes, and came a long day’s journey to see it, not approaching it by the narrow pass that led to its front walls, but laboriously climbing the hills from whose tops they could in safety get a view of the old place where there had so suddenly flared up fires dead two hundred years.

What they saw – all they could see – was a grey whinstone tower built extraordinarily with its back against Cnoc Dearg, a red precipice hundreds of feet high, a gable and front to the very edge of the rock that hung over a deep dark pool made by the falls at the fork of the rivers, its main gable opening on the cattle-fold and the pass that gave the only entrance to Kincreggan. They saw a place as ill to storm as though it crowned a mountain, a place devised strictly for hours of war – but still a beautiful place, wherein a person of fancy might be content to dwell for ever as in a petty kingdom, the fish of the pool his, the birds that clucked or sang in the alder thickets round the fold at the mountain foot, the deer that came down for the sun of the afternoon, the cattle that lowed in the pen.

And Alasdair Dhu had the cattle! The people could see them plainly from the hill, and in certain puffs of the spring wind hear their geumnaich– the sad complaint that Highland kyloes make on strange pastures, remembering the sweeter taste of the grass of home. The cattle were Kilree’s. They had gone from his hill at night as by magic, and in the morning they were in Kincreggan fold, where stolen herds were harboured before the old Macaulays went into the mist, and where there had not been a hoof in four generations. With the cattle, furthermore, went missing a number of muskets from the armoury of Kilree. Macaulay the lawyer was back at his forefathers’ business!

The first thing a man to-day would do in the like circumstances would be to call for the police; but even to-day, in the Islands, the police are rare and remote from Kilree, and at that time it was as ill to reach them as to reach St Kilda, even had there been no popular conviction that the civil law alone is all that a Highland gentleman can with propriety call into action. So Kilree for a while did nothing but nurse his wound, and Macaulay lurked in his fastness alone, no one – by the Captain’s orders – lifting a hand against him. But the stabbing of his master and the lifting of his bestial were only the start of his escapade, which became the more astonishing after his clerk, the lad Macdonald, out of Moidart, was sent to him on a curious mission.

Macdonald was a fellow without fear, and it must be added, without brains either, otherwise he might never have done a thing that made all the Isles laugh at him when they heard later what he had carried, and another thing that bears out my premiss that the primitive man is immediately below a good many well-laundered modern shirts.

“I think I could bring that madman of mine to his senses,” Macaulay’s wife said to the clerk one day.

“The sooner the better, then,” said Macdonald, “for there’s much to do before the rent collection.” He spoke as if his master were only out upon a drinking-bout.

“If I just had him here for ten minutes!” said Mrs Macaulay.

“You might – you might venture to go to Kincreggan and see him,” suggested the clerk.

“I have more regard for my life,” said the woman. “I’m ower much of the Lowlander to trust myself in a den with a mad Highlander – even if he’s my own man. Forbye” (here she smiled), “forbye, I’ve tried it already. I have been twice at Kincreggan in the early morning, and he kept me fifty yards off the walls with his gun. But I would not care to have that mentioned in the place; it’s perhaps as little to my credit as to his own. Oh, if I had him under this roof again for ten minutes, or could get a certain thing delivered in his hands – ” She broke off, and looked into Macdonald’s face quickly as with an inspiration.

“What is it?” asked the clerk.

“A little packet,” she replied; “just a small packet you could carry in your hand.”

“Buidseachas – I mean witchcraft?” said Macdonald, who had brought a good many superstitions from Moidart.

“Well, well – in a way, a sort of witchcraft,” she admitted, with a smile. “It is part of a charm that wiles men from their wild ways.”

“I don’t know but what I might risk taking it to him, then,” said Macdonald, and so it happened that that very evening he found himself challenged fifty yards from the wall of Kincreggan, with a pair of slippers wrapped carefully in paper in his hands – nothing more.

“What have you there, Macdonald?” cried the master, girning over the neck of a musket at his clerk, who shook on the edge of the river at the narrowest part of the pass.

“I do not know,” was the lad’s answer, for indeed his knowledge of what he carried was due to his own curiosity and not to any information he had got from the lady who sent him. “I do not know; I was sent with it by your wife, Mr Macaulay.”

“Kincreggan, you mean,” corrected the factor, plainly determined on the old territorial honours.

“Kincreggan.”

“Drop it into the pool, then,” commanded the madman, snuggling closer to his weapon, and Macdonald did as he was told.

“Now come in and I will speak to you,” said Macaulay, and so the clerk got into Kincreggan, and however his master coaxed or cozened him, he stayed there.

For some days after the cracking of guns was heard echoing for miles round the hollow of Kincreggan. That sent the island mad with an itching curiosity. On all the roads men and women travelled, and up the face of Ben Buidhe, to lie on the myrtle and look at Alasdair Dhu and his clerk shooting and fishing as in the fine free ancient days. It was no secret that many admired the outlaw; his state of nature seemed so enviable compared with their own poor prosaic lives as fishers or shepherds, that he might have had recruits if he had been more accessible. The people were vexed for the Captain, it is true, but not so vexed that they could not admire the cleverness of the man who, bred in towns and brought up to the pen, had lifted the laird’s cattle as neatly as if he had tramped a lifetime through night and mist with his forebears. They got a new light upon society and its rights and wrongs, though they might not have the philosophy to explain it clearly; they seemed to see that might was right at any time; they searched themselves in vain to see wherein Macaulay and his clerk, possessing themselves of Macaulay’s ancient home and of things not made with hands, but nature’s gifts, were any worse than the long line of Kilree’s family that, ending in the Captain himself, had used cunning and contrivance to get and keep these things. It was said that a kind of fever went through the men when they saw the example of Macaulay, that they abandoned their common tasks awhile, and might, but for mothers and wives, have gone wholly wrong.

The Captain was no sooner out of his doctor’s hands than he sent a corps of his workmen to expel the outlaws and pull down Kincreggan House.

“By heavens!” he said, “I’m hardly angry at the fellow for his mischievousness; it takes so uncommon a form. He might have robbed me all these years decently like a man of business in quite another fashion far less interesting. It’s madness, of course, but it’s in a lot of blood that runs very sluggishly in these parts nowadays. I sometimes have had a touch of it myself; so I’ll give the rogue law.”

Up to Kincreggan, then, went his men with picks, and the first of them had only got round the bend of the pass when a bullet flew over his head and another close behind it. The lawyer and his clerk were determined to hold Kincreggan as Ranald More Macaulay had held it against the Captain’s grandfather!

Next the Captain himself went up, and reached as far as the wall of the fold where his own cattle were imprisoned. A cry stopped him at the wall, and he looked up to see the pieces of Macaulay and the lad directed at his breast.

“A parley, Kincreggan!” he cried, slyly giving his late factor the honour.

The lawyer was hard to recognise, so oddly had he changed from the shaven and well-put-on man of business who had plied an industrious quill but lately at a desk. A beard blackened his face; the pilfered web of tartan was belted round his loins into a kilt, with the end of it dragged round his shoulder for a plaid in the fashion of the age of Mar; a blue bonnet was scrugged down upon his brow, and on his feet, that used to enjoy the slippers of his own fireside, were cuarains– roughly-made moccasins of ox-hide with the hair still on them. It was, to the eye and imagination of the Captain, as if time and change had someway overlooked the shelter of Kincreggan in its mountain cleft, and there had remained in it, unknown and unsuspected, some eddying backwater of the wild old days. In faith, Macaulay in such an ancient polity had been a chief of chiefs; he had it in his aspect and his mien. He stood against the crenels of a bastion, his whole figure revealed, an elbow on the stones and the musket balanced in his hands, a kind of lazy elegance in his attitude, ease and independence, health and pride. He looked at his old client as an eagle might look at a lamb, swithering whether he should swoop or stay still. The only thing to mar the dignity of the picture was the presence of his clerk in an angle of the wall besides him – still the ’prentice lawyer, doubtless even to the ink on the very finger that hung on the trigger of the weapon with which he covered the Captain.

“I will be giving you three minutes, Kilree,” said Macaulay, “to get the length of the boulder yonder on your way back. If I see so much as your heel after that I will shoot at it, and you will not escape with your life a second time.”

“That is very fine, and I’ll not deny it is picturesque,” said the Captain, “but it’s a little out of date and a cursed folly. More than that, it’s robbery, to say nothing about the – the accident with the knife, and nowadays there’s admitted to be no grace about a robbery even committed in a kilt. It might be all very well for your grandfather and my own to fight like this over these walls, but – ”

“How did Kincreggan come into the hands of your family?” interrupted the lawyer.

“You have me there,” admitted the Captain, with a little awkward laugh. “You have me there, and I’m not a lawyer to obscure the facts. Our folk fought yours for it, and having got it – ”

“Well, the fighting was not finished,” said the outlaw; “I have begun it again, and Kincreggan is Macaulay’s. Go back, Kilree, go back; and if you come again, bring a coffin under your arm.”

The Captain went, and it was the last he was to see of his factor till that stormy Lammas day when the outlaw came home.

Macaulay roved the moors and forest while his clerk kept ward in their fortress. Stags fell to his gun, the best linns gave him fish. At the market in Marinish, over the ford on the other island, where the Captain’s clan was unpopular, Macaulay one day appeared at a cattle tryst and sold beasts the buyers did not inquire too closely about, and he replaced them in his fold with others lifted boldly from Kilree’s home farm on his way back from the market. Night and day he was watched for, but night or day either he or Macdonald was awake and waiting; and more than once he was at the other end of the parish on some exploit while Kilree’s men kept an eye on the pass.

He became the glory of his own island, and a toast at fairs in all the Islands. “Alasdair Dhu” was the name on every lip; his wife shared his popularity, and people sent her gifts of sheep and fowl from as far as the mainland. And all she would say was, “What a silly thing! An island of men against one man in a dream! If I had just had him here!”

IV

The Captain, who had been with his corps in the Lowlands, came home, thought hard, and made a plan. “If my factor is so fond of nature, I must fight him with that same,” he said, and for two weeks before Lammas he had every man in his service building a dam below the pass of Kincreggan. It was so clever a way of getting the better of Alasdair Dhu that the men who admired him most now turned most readily to spoil him. They cut down big firs on either side of the pass, so that the trees fell over and jammed between the cliffs. When the pile was high enough they backed it up with brushwood and turf till it looked like a lofty wall.

“I’m thinking that will do now,” said the Captain when it was done. “Let us have the first of the floods of Lammas, and you will see a rat come squealing from his hole.”

When the dam was finished it was dry weather, the river at the pass a trickle; but the Captain’s own luck was with him, for the very next day a storm burst on the Islands. He went to the top of Ben Buidhe, and joined the folk there who were looking down on Kincreggan. They saw a spectacle! The river, pit-black in its linns and cream-white in its falls, gulped down the narrow gorge as if all the waters of the world were hasting there; the cliff above the keep was streaming, the path to the house was flooded, the cattle were belly-deep in the fold, and bellowed mournfully. Every minute saw the water perceptibly rise till it lay like a loch deep about Kincreggan House. By the time the gloaming came on the glen the water washed the lintels of the lower storey.

“It’s a dour rat, by my troth!” said the Captain. “I thought we would have heard squealing by this time.” He shook the rain from his plaid, and set off for home. Some say he was heedless of Macaulay’s fate; others more plausibly argue that he knew very well Macaulay had friends on the hillside who would rescue him when the need arose.

However it was Macaulay got out of his trap, he got out by himself, with his clerk behind him. The lad ran over the island, took a boat to Arisaig, and never came back again; the factor reached the door of his home at dark an amazing figure in drenched and savage garments, with a dirk lying flat against the brawn of his bare arm. He burst upon his wife like a calamity, but she never blenched. The kettle hung upon its chain; with a thrust of her foot she swung it over the fire, and rose to her feet to put a hand on the shoulder of her soaking lord.

“Oh, Alick! come in, come in!” she said, and so mighty he looked and strange in the room that had known the decent lawyer, it seemed to her as if he filled it. The river ran from his garments, and when he moved, the hides on his feet sucked upon the flooring.

“They tell me at Kilree the Captain is here,” he said, looking uplifted about him, keeping the blade of his weapon out of her sight.

“He is just come,” she answered, “and is in front there, keeping your place for you.”

A devilish satisfaction betrayed itself in Macaulay’s face. “I have tasted life,” he said, stretching out his arms, and gloating, as it seemed, upon himself. “I have tasted life, and I would not change with kings! All the clan cries in me, and I am proud, proud! But there is one thing wanting: I will make sure of him this time,” and saying that, he flourished the dirk and made for the door that led to his writing chamber.

His wife gave a cry, and put herself before him. “Oh, Alick!” she said, as calm as she could be, “you are very wet; at least you will first of all put on dry hose and take a dish of tea,” pushing him gently at the same time towards his accustomed chair. He fondled his weapon, and sat in the humour of one who is willing to put off a pleasure that it may be greater by delay. She plucked the cuarains from his feet and put on him hose and slippers, all in a nervous haste, and the slippers were no sooner on his feet than he shook himself, looked with disgust on his drenched tartan, and threw the dirk away.

“My God!” said he; “what cantrip is this?”

“You will have a dish of tea,” said the wife, hurriedly preparing it; and he wriggled his toes in the slippers and sat closer to the fire, cherishing its warmth with that accustomed manner he forgot the day he went astray. Again and again he looked at himself, and, sipping the tea, “What a folly! What a folly!” he would utter. “What put such mischief in my brain? And we were over head and ears with business at the office! I must work night and day if I am to be ready for the rents. Young Macdonald, too! Tut, tut! the thing was fair ridiculous! I’m black affronted. Flora, woman, haste ye and get my breeks!”

The discarded broadcloth was put out; he sheared and shaved himself before the glass till the wild man of the mountain was gone, and emerged the lawyer, then walked into his writing chamber.

“Good evening, Captain,” he said briskly to his client, just as if he had been out for an airing. “This has been a stupid business – a remarkably stupid business. I must crave your pardon. At such an inconvenient time, too! But I hope to make it up some way.”

The Captain could scarcely trust his senses. He had risen to defend himself against the savage, and here was his sober man of business back!

“Well, it has been what might be called a fairly busy summer with us, Mr Macaulay,” said the Captain, at his wits’ end how to meet so curious a penitent. “And I have still got a twinge of your penknife in my breast now and then.”

The factor’s face reddened. “I declare, I’m affronted,” said he. “With a penknife! Tut, tut! – a villainously silly weapon, Captain; and still it might have been a serious enough thing for you. I’m beat to understand it; some lesion of the brain, as the medical jurisprudists say; I would never harm a cat, except durante furore– if – if I deliberated on it. I have little doubt I’m the talk of the country – most annoying, most annoying! I should not wonder if the profession made it the occasion of a complaint against me; and if it come to that, sir, I hope I may look for your support?”

He took up his penknife again – it still lay on his desk – and the Captain stood back from him abruptly, but he need not have done so, for the lawyer was only going to sharp his pen, as benign and proper a man as ever charged a fee. His client did not know whether to laugh or storm. He felt like to laugh at the ludicrousness of the way Macaulay had returned to his senses; he felt anger with the unaccountable spirit which made the offender more perturbed about the figure he must henceforth cut in public than that he should for a summer have played the part of robber, and wellnigh been a murderer too. But the good humour of Kilree prevailed, and he laughed – a demonstration that but visibly increased Macaulay’s chagrin.

“It is no laughing affair, I assure you – at least for me,” said he. “Here I am six months behind with my work, and I doubt not all my correspondents furious.”

“Mrs Macaulay and I between us have made shift to deal with the correspondence in your – in your holiday,” said the laird. “The most serious thing, I’m thinking, is a drove of cattle sold by Alasdair Dhu at Marinish tryst; I’m too poor a man to afford the loss of them.”

“You will not lose a penny,” said Macaulay. “I got the best of prices for them, and have the money now. It was an irregularity.”

“So one might call it,” agreed the Captain.

“It was an irregularity, a sudden craze. If I had been a man who drank – ”

“You would probably have drowned the flame of folly long before now,” said the Captain, who sometimes took a dram.

“A flame, exactly! Just a flame; no word better describes it. When you spoke of taking down that rotten den, I was for the time possessed. I can honestly tell you that a score of thoughts came sweeping through me that I never harboured for a second in my life before.”

“Nor had intruded on you before, eh, Macaulay?” said the Captain.

“That – that is neither here nor there; if every man confessed the thoughts his better nature rejected we were all condemned for the gallows sooner or later.”

“I must say I was looking for a little more contrition, Mr Macaulay,” said the Captain. “You’ll allow the escapade was a little unusual, and not without some inconvenience to myself? You seem to take it in so odd a spirit that I cannot be sure against a recurrence. I may tell you that I’m determined to have Kincreggan down – I can be as dour as yourself, you see – and though I might be prepared to fight the point of its ownership once in the old fashion, I cannot guarantee that I should be ready for that a second time.”

“Not a word!” said Macaulay hastily. “My position was ridiculous in law and equity. Ne dominia rerum sint incerta neve lites sint perpetuæ– even if your folk had held the place for only forty years instead of two hundred, your claim would be unassailable, as I’m prepared to contest in any court in the land. Kincreggan, Captain – pooh! I esteem the place so little that upon my word I would not grudge to put powder to it myself. And, if you will permit me, I’ll take my desk again.”

Kilree rose from the lawyer’s seat with a chuckle, and Macaulay, indicating another, sank into his old chair with a sigh of satisfaction.