Many a time, in college or in camp, I had planned the style of my home-coming. Master Webster, in the Humanities, droning away like a Boreraig bagpipe, would be sending my mind back to Shira Glen, its braes and corries and singing waters, and Ben Bhuidhe over all, and with my chin on a hand I would ponder on how I should go home again when this weary scholarship was over. I had always a ready fancy and some of the natural vanity of youth, so I could see myself landing off the lugger at the quay of Inneraora town, three inches more of a man than when I left with a firkin of herring and a few bolls of meal for my winter’s provand; thicker too at the chest, and with a jacket of London green cloth with brass buttons. Would the fishermen about the quay-head not lean over the gun’les of their skiffs and say, “There goes young Elrigmore from Colleging, well-knit in troth, and a pretty lad”? I could hear (all in my daydream in yon place of dingy benches) the old women about the well at the town Cross say, “Oh laochain! thou art come back from the Galldach, and Glascow College; what a thousand curious things thou must know, and what wisdom thou must have, but never a change on thine affability to the old and to the poor!” But it was not till I had run away from Glascow College, and shut the boards for good and all, as I thought, on my humane letters and history, and gone with cousin Gavin to the German wars in Mackay’s Corps of true Highlanders, that I added a manlier thought to my thinking of the day when I should come home to my native place. I’ve seen me in the camp at night, dog-wearied after stoury marching on their cursed foreign roads, keeping my eyes open and the sleep at an arm’s-length, that I might think of Shira Glen. Whatever they may say of me or mine, they can never deny but I had the right fond heart for my own countryside, and I have fought men for speaking of its pride and poverty--their ignorance, their folly!--for what did they ken of the Highland spirit? I would be lying in the lap of the night, and my Ferrara sword rolled in my plaid as a pillow for my head, fancying myself--all those long wars over, march, siege, and sack--riding on a good horse down the pass of Aora and through the arches into the old town. Then, it was not the fishermen or the old women I thought of, but the girls, and the winking stars above me were their eyes, glinting merrily and kindly on a stout young gentleman soldier with jack and morion, sword at haunch, spur at heel, and a name for bravado never a home-biding laird in our parish had, burgh or landward. I would sit on my horse so, the chest well out, the back curved, the knees straight, one gauntlet off to let my white hand wave a salute when needed, and none of all the pretty ones would be able to say Elrigmore thought another one the sweetest Oh! I tell you we learnt many arts in the Lowland wars, more than they teach Master of Art in the old biggin’ in the Hie Street of Glascow.
One day, at a place called Nordlingen near the Mid Franken, binding a wound Gavin got in the sword-arm, I said, “What’s your wish at this moment, cousin?”
He looked at me with a melting eye, and the flush hove to his face.
“‘Fore God, Colin,” said he, “I would give my twelve months’ wage to stand below the lintel of my mother’s door and hear her say ‘Darling scamp!’”
“If you had your wish, Gavin, when and how would you go into Inneraora town after those weary years away?”
“Man, I’ve made that up long syne,” said he, and the tear was at his cheek. “Let me go into it cannily at night-fall from the Cromalt end, when the boys and girls were dancing on the green to the pipes at the end of a harvest-day. Them in a reel, with none of the abulziements of war about me, but a plain civil lad like the rest, I would join in the strathspey and kiss two or three of the girls ere ever they jaloused a stranger was among them.”
Poor Gavin, good Gavin! he came home no way at all to his mother and his mountains; but here was I, with some of his wish for my fortune, riding cannily into Inneraora town in the dark.
It is wonderful how travel, even in a marching company of cavaliers of fortune, gives scope to the mind. When I set foot, twelve years before this night I speak of, on the gabert that carried me down to Dunbarton on my way to the Humanities classes, I could have sworn I was leaving a burgh most large and wonderful. The town houses of old Stonefield, Craignish, Craignure, Asknish, and the other cadets of Clan Campbell, had such a strong and genteel look; the windows, all but a very few, had glass in every lozen, every shutter had a hole to let in the morning light, and each door had its little ford of stones running across the gutter that sped down the street, smelling fishily a bit, on its way to the shore. For me, in those days, each close that pierced the tall lands was as wide and high as a mountain eas, the street itself seemed broad and substantial, crowded with people worth kenning for their graces and the many things they knew.
I came home now on this night of nights with Munchen and Augsburg, and the fine cities of all the France, in my mind, and I tell you I could think shame of this mean rickle of stones I had thought a town, were it not for the good hearts and kind I knew were under every roof. The broad street crowded with people, did I say? A little lane rather; and Elrigmore, with schooling and the wisdom of travel, felt he could see into the heart’s core of the cunningest merchant in the place.
But anyway, here I was, riding into town from the Cromalt end on a night in autumn. It was after ten by my Paris watch when I got the length of the Creags, and I knew that there was nothing but a sleeping town before me, for our folks were always early bedders when the fishing season was on. The night hung thick with stars, but there was no moon; a stiff wind from the east prinked at my right ear and cooled my horse’s skin, as he slowed down after a canter of a mile or two on this side of Pennymore. Out on the loch I could see the lights of a few herring-boats lift and fall at the end of their trail of nets.
“Too few of you there for the town to be busy and cheerful,” said I to myself; “no doubt the bulk of the boats are down at Otter, damming the fish in the narrow gut, and keeping them from searching up to our own good townsmen.”
I pressed my brute to a trot, and turned round into the nether part of the town. It was what I expected--the place was dark, black out. The people were sleeping; the salt air of Loch Finne went sighing through the place in a way that made me dowie for old days. We went over the causeway-stones with a clatter that might have wakened the dead, but no one put a head out, and I thought of the notion of a cheery home-coming poor Gavin had--my dear cousin, stroked out and cold under foreign clods at Velshiem, two leagues below the field of Worms of Hessen, on the banks of the Rhine, in Low Germanie.
It is a curious business this riding into a town in the dark waste of night; curious even in a strange town when all are the same for you that sleep behind those shutters and those doors, but doubly curious when you know that behind the dark fronts are folk lying that you know well, that have been thinking, and drinking, and thriving when you were far away. As I went clattering slowly by, I would say at one house front, “Yonder’s my old comrade, Tearlach, who taught me my one tune on the pipe-chanter; is his beard grown yet, I wonder?” At another, “There is the garret window of the schoolmaster’s daughter--does she sing so sweetly nowadays in the old kirk?”
In the dead middle of the street I pulled my horse up, just to study the full quietness of the hour. Leaning over, I put a hand on his nostrils and whispered in his ear for a silence, as we do abroad in ambuscade. Town Innera-ora slept sound, sure enough! All to hear was the spilling of the river at the cascade under the bridge and the plopping of the waves against the wall we call the ramparts, that keeps the sea from thrashing on the Tolbooth. And then over all I could hear a most strange moaning sound, such as we boys used to make with a piece of lath nicked at the edges and swung hurriedly round the head by a string. It was made by the wind, I knew, for it came loudest in the gusty bits of the night and from the east, and when there was a lull I could hear it soften away and end for a second or two with a dunt, as if some heavy, soft thing struck against wood.
Whatever it was, the burghers of Inneraora paid no heed, but slept, stark and sound, behind their steeked shutters.
The solemnity of the place that I knew so much better in a natural lively mood annoyed me, and I played there and then a prank more becoming a boy in his first kilt than a gentleman of education and travel and some repute for sobriety. I noticed I was opposite the house of a poor old woman they called Black Kate, whose door was ever the target in my young days for every lad that could brag of a boot-toe, and I saw that the shutter, hanging ajee on one hinge, was thrown open against the harled wall of the house. In my doublet-pocket there were some carabeen bullets, and taking one out, I let bang at the old woman’s little lozens. There was a splinter of glass, and I waited to see if any one should come out to find who had done the damage. My trick was in vain; no one came. Old Kate, as I found next day, was dead since Martinmas, and her house was empty.
Still the moaning sound came from the town-head, and I went slowly riding in its direction. It grew clearer and yet uncannier as I sped on, and mixed with the sough of it I could hear at last the clink of chains.
“What in God’s name have I here?” said I to myself, turning round Islay Campbell’s corner, and yonder was my answer!
The town gibbets were throng indeed! Two corpses swung in the wind, like net bows on a drying-pole, going from side to side, making the woeful sough and clink of chains, and the dunt I had heard when the wind dropped.
I grued more at the sound of the soughing than at the sight of the hanged fellows, for I’ve seen the Fell Sergeant in too many ugly fashions to be much put about at a hanging match. But it was such a poor home-coming! It told me as plain as could be, what I had heard rumours of in the low country, riding round from the port of Leith, that the land was uneasy, and that pit and gallows were bye-ordinar busy at the gates of our castle. When I left for my last session at Glascow College, the countryside was quiet as a village green, never a raider nor a reiver in the land, and so poor the Doomster’s trade (Black George) that he took to the shoeing of horses.
“There must be something wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant indeed,” I thought, “when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a drunkard’s convoy on either hand to prop it up.”
But it was no time for meditation. Through the rags of plaiding on the chains went the wind again so eerily that I bound to be off, and I put my horse to it, bye the town-head and up the two miles to Glen Shira. I was sore and galled sitting on the saddle; my weariness hung at the back of my legs and shoulders like an ague, and there was never a man in this world came home to his native place so eager for taking supper and sleep as young Elrigmore.
What I expected at my father’s door I am not going to set down here. I went from it a fool, with not one grace about me but the love of my good mother, and the punishment I had for my hot and foolish cantrip was many a wae night on foreign fields, vexed to the core for the sore heart I had left at home.
My mind, for all my weariness, was full of many things, and shame above all, as I made for my father’s house. The horse had never seen Glen Shira, but it smelt the comfort of the stable and whinnied cheerfully as I pulled up at the gate. There was but one window to the gable-end of Elrigmore, and it was something of a surprise to me to find a light in it, for our people were not overly rich in these days, and candle or cruisie was wont to be doused at bedtime. More was my surprise when, leading my horse round to the front, feeling my way in the dark by memory, I found the oak door open and my father, dressed, standing in the light of it.
A young sgalag came running to the reins, and handing them to him, I stepped into the light of the door, my bonnet in my hand.
“Step in, sir, caird or gentleman,” said my father--looking more bent at the shoulder than twelve years before.
I went under the door-lintel, and stood a little abashed before him.
“Colin! Colin!” he cried in the Gaelic “Did I not ken it was you?” and he put his two hands on my shoulders.
“It is Colin sure enough, father dear,” I said, slipping readily enough into the mother tongue they did their best to get out of me at Glascow College. “Is he welcome in this door?” and the weariness weighed me down at the hip and bowed my very legs.
He gripped me tight at the elbows, and looked me hungrily in the face.
“If you had a murdered man’s head in your oxter, Colin,” said he, “you were still my son. Colin, Colin! come ben and put off your boots!”
“Mother------” I said, but he broke in on my question.
“Come in, lad, and sit down. You are back from the brave wars you never went to with my will, and you’ll find stirring times here at your own parish. It’s the way of the Sennachies’ stories.”
“How is that, sir?”
“They tell, you know, that people wander far on the going foot for adventure, and adventure is in the first turning of their native lane.”
I was putting my boots off before a fire of hissing logs that filled the big room with a fir-wood smell right homely and comforting to my heart, and my father was doing what I should have known was my mother’s office if weariness had not left me in a sort of stupor--he was laying on the board a stout and soldierly supper and a tankard of the red Bordeaux wine the French traffickers bring to Loch Finne to trade for cured herring. He would come up now and then where I sat fumbling sleepily at my belt, and put a hand on my head, a curious unmanly sort of thing I never knew my father do before, and I felt put-about at this petting, which would have been more like my sister if ever I had had the luck to have one.
“You are tired, Colin, my boy?” he said.
“A bit, father, a bit,” I answered; “rough roads you know. I was landed at break of day at Skipness and--Is mother------?”
“Sit in, laochain! Did you meet many folks on the road?”
“No, sir; as pestilent barren a journey as ever I trotted on, and the people seemingly on the hill, for their crops are unco late in the field.”
“Ay, ay, lad, so they are,” said my father, pulling back his shoulders a bit--a fairly straight wiry old man, with a name for good swordsmanship in his younger days.
I was busy at a cold partridge, and hard at it, when I thought again how curious it was that my father should be a-foot in the house at such time of night and no one else about, he so early a bedder for ordinary and never the last to sneck the outer door.
“Did you expect any one, father,” I asked, “that you should be waiting up with the collation, and the outer door unsnecked?”
“There was never an outer door snecked since you left, Colin,” said he, turning awkwardly away and looking hard into the loof of his hand like a wife spaeing fortunes--for sheer want, I could see, of some engagement for his eyes. “I could never get away with the notion that some way like this at night would ye come back to Elngmore.”
“Mother would miss me?”
“She did, Colin, she did; I’m not denying.”
“She’ll be bedded long syne, no doubt, father?”
My father looked at me and gulped at the throat.
“Bedded indeed, poor Colin,” said he, “this very day in the clods of Kilmalieu!”
And that was my melancholy home-coming to my father’s house of Elngmore, in the parish of Glcnaora, in the shire of Argile.
