The Bride

by Margaret Irwin

  All the blood in his body seemed to have ebbed away from that sword-cut and the one he had got on his head and a bullet- wound in his side; they could be nothing serious, he assured his companions, or he would not have been able to keep going as he had done. But he had kept going chiefly because of the necessity to keep them going.

  To encourage and command obedience in whatever straits was so much a part of himself that he never noticed it, nor did his companions, who knew only that as long as they were with him they had to go on, to the end of the world if need be, even though their only desire in the world had become the blinding, agonizing desire to lie down and die where they lay.

  He tried to cheer them on by telling them how he had been lost before on hills as huge and desolate as these, and had found help just as he had given up all hope.

  They nibbled young heather shoots when they came on them, but the season was very late after the severe winter and there was little to be found. If only they had carried a little oatmeal in a pouch! It was all he and his Highlanders had been able to take with them on their forced marches over the mountains. A very small quantity, mixed with cold water into a paste on the point of his dirk, would keep a man going for days.

  And on that winter march to Inverlochy they had caught a deer and hacked it into collops, which they had been thankful to devour raw and bleeding. The notion of any one of them having the strength to pursue and kill a deer now made him laugh feebly, foolishly, until he saw his comrades looking strangely at him and realized that they were afraid he was losing his senses.

  He had quickly to recall some silly story of that campaign to explain his laughter: had either of them heard how they had routed the Campbells at Fyvie, when they had run out of ammunition, with a rain of bullets all melted down from the inordinate number of pewter chamber-pots they had found in Fyvie Castle?

  A faint echo of Major Sinclair’s barking laugh answered him, but Sir Edward staggered on, plainly hearing nothing. They each took his arm on either side.

  ‘Come on, man. We’ll march together, though it’s dot-and- go-one to keep step with your game leg!’

  Or with this ground, one foot up or down at every step. If only it could be level going for one moment!

  Again they sang:

  ‘ “March, march, why the de’il dinna ye march?” ’

  until at last Sir Edward’s dragging limp could march no more over that broken, tangled, climbing ground, and he fell between them, dragging them to the wet earth; and this time it was not that he would not, but that he could not rise.

  There was no chance for him unless his companions should stumble on some remote shieling in the hills, or a shepherd out after a stray sheep, who could bring him food and help.

  Montrose and Major Sinclair decided to part company so as to double the chances. They dragged Sir Edward under an overhanging rock by a stream which would give him some small shelter from the icy wind and also make the best landmark they could find.

  Then they went their several ways.

  Montrose was alone now, and the silence fell on him like a stone.

  For four years he had been in the polite noise, the elaborate careless-seeming chatter of well-bred crowds in one princely Court after another; for the last few weeks he had been in armed camps with the clamour of bugles and pipes and drilling of soldiers all round him, the clank of harness and the firing of musket practice, the sharp words of command, the harsh decisive argument of soldiers; for the last two days and nights, longer than any weeks, than any years, he had been cheering on his two exhausted companions.

  Now they were no longer marching with him; he no longer spoke nor sang, no longer heard any sound.

  The silence of the hills fell all round him, drowning him; at each staggering footstep he sank into the dripping moss, and only the squelching, sucking whisper of the bog spoke to him. Until in despair he cried aloud into the silence, and the wild birds answered ‘Curlew – ew.’

  To lie down and never get up again, that was becoming the only thing left to wish for. He had prevented the others from doing it, but now that desire seized on himself, and there was no one for him to command and encourage, to force to do his will, for it had ceased to be his will now it had only to do with himself. His life or death no longer mattered.

  ‘Do you live and save the cause,’ young Frendraught had called to him. What cause? The cause of a king who had played him false, had looked both ways ‘like Janus’ face’, as all men would see when they came to judge between him and Charles. Would they not say of himself:

  ‘Alas, he had too just a cause

  Never to love thee more’?

  The wild rhythm of his high imperious song of love and war was throbbing now in his spent veins; he had not sung it to his companions, for he could not bear to sing it, too much of his life and strangely mingled loves had gone into it. All his love for his King and country, now wasted and thrown away, had gone into it; and his love for his wife Magdalen whom that other love had finally brought to her death; and now his love for Louey whom that love would leave forsaken, a widow before ever she had been his wife.

  With that thought of her he knew that he was finished, which he had not known before, and when next he stumbled he did not try to recover himself, but let himself fall and there lie.

  A famished quiet fell over him; the whole world became empty of regret or of desire, even for warmth and food. It would not take long to die, he thought; but sleep came to tell him he was not dead, for he woke from it to such an anguish of cold and hunger and aching limbs that he could no longer lie still.

  He sucked the stiff congealed blood on his hand; it tasted salt and increased his ravenous hunger. A man had been known to eat his own hand before now, but a man was mad when he had come to that. It would be better to chew the glove again; it would be better to move and stumble on somehow, anyhow, even if he could scarcely see where he was going.

  And that was not because it was night, but because the drenched heather and dead red shapeless bracken kept shifting and clouding, and his eyes could not focus on them. Still there was no sun, only grey mists now that scudded and wreathed themselves before him – or were they the wraiths of his own mind?

  There were eyes watching him through the mist, but as he tried to meet them they vanished into mist. He would not lie here to become a raving beast with pain and hunger, he would stand up to his fate whatever it should be.

  ‘March, march, why the de’il dinna ye march?’

  He pulled himself somehow on to his feet, though the wet and cold had frozen him so stiff that every movement put him on the rack.

  Now he must take command of himself as of his comrades, and not prove more faithless in obedience than his own men. He would go on, no matter in which direction, and on he went, trying once again to sing as he had done with his two companions.

  ‘ “The deer runs wild on hill and dale,

  The birds fly wild from tree to tree,

  But there is neither bread nor kail

  To fend my men and me.” ’

  He had not sung that to them either, and yet he had sung it not so very long ago – to two companions. He saw their faces before him, his ‘most affectionate friend Elizabeth’ and her daughter Louise. Louise wore a silly peaked cap and her hair was tidy for almost the only time he had ever seen it so, and somehow she had annoyed him, God knows why, and they had quarrelled; they had always been quarrelling then, was it for the pleasure of making it up? It must have been, for they knew what was in each other’s minds.

  ‘Wherever you go, whatever you are doing,’ she had said, ‘I shall know it, I think, long, long before word can come of it.’

  Does she know now? Dear God, let her not know.

  Passionately as he prayed it, he yet knew that he was praying against something that was in the depths of both of them, that he might as well pray that he and she had never been born. For if it was her agony to be with him, it was also the reason that she cared to be alive.

&nb
sp; The rain was now falling heavier and heavier, striking at his face and hands, running in rivulets down his neck, stabbing anew at his already ice-wet skin, and along his bones ran shuddering currents, now cold, now burning hot – they ran before his eyes, dizzying them so that he could not see where to put his next step.

  There was nothing beyond this small wet circle of rain and squelching moss and heather through which he stumbled; it spread over the whole world and nothing lay beyond; there was nothing beyond this moment, no change of night nor day, of good or ill fortune, nothing could happen to change it ever again.

  He had reached the end of the world, but when you reached the end of the world it went on, – on and on for ever.

  He was not alone now. Who was it walking with him? He could not see; thick tempests of cold rain poured between himself and that shadowy wavering figure; there was no sound of any footsteps but his own, sucking down into the bog, now pausing to gather strength for the next plunge, now staggering, sinking on. He called again and again. A thin cracked voice he heard, so feeble it must come from a great way off – but presently he knew it for his own. There was the tinkle and whisper of little streams running down from the hills through long grasses and moss, the relentless swish of the rain, – these were the only voices beside his own. But he was not alone.

  Who walked with him in the rain?

  ‘Louey!’ he called. ‘Louey!’

  And now he saw her long hair astream in the thin silver spears of the rain. She turned her head and looked at him, slantwise, as she had so often done when she was laughing; her eyes were of the air, her body of the rain, but they were her eyes, it was herself walking before him; however fast he tried to follow her, she was still always just ahead of him; he could not reach her, for always those long spears of rain were between them, and the trickle of hidden running water whispered and mocked at him instead of her voice.

  Then for a moment he saw her quite clearly, outlined against an obscure white light that every moment was getting brighter. The rain swept past him, swept her with it, she had vanished with the rain. Now he saw the hillside beyond, and patches of clear sky above, and across it came the torn dark figures of men fleeing from the lost battle; on dark horses they rode, whose long manes were streeling behind them, his men fleeing and he among them up there in the opening sky.

  The rain had piled itself up in black clouds rolling higher and higher up the sides of some of the nearer hills – and he knew them! He knew those rounded humped shapes. He knew that long pale green strip of wood sunk among the dead bracken, purple with rain, the trees huddling low for shelter on the deep banks of a stream. There was a wall of bluish rock that went up in steps like a staircase, spattered with bright moss – he knew that rock on Speyside.

  He stood still, trying desperately to pull his wits together. Hope was giving him strength, clearing his mind as the scene began to show itself before his eyes. Louey had vanished, could never have been there. But surely this was real, and these were his own familiar hills where he and Alasdair had held their base through their year of victories? Could he have reached them in this time?

  Again and again he tried to count over the times of darkness, for then he would know how many days and nights he had been walking; he must have been going now for three days and nights. If he had missed his direction north as he had intended, but crossed the Oykell at its source and gone south and by luck passed clean through the armies of his enemies, he might well have reached Speyside.

  He had marched thirty miles in a single night before now, and on two nights running; he had walked twenty miles over the heather as easily as a stroll round his home of Kincardine, when he had gone to meet Alasdair.

  Then he had after all made his goal and could now begin his campaign anew, building up his force among the friendly hills he knew so well. Hope was now racing faster than the fever through his veins. Hurry might have given the slip to his captors, he was quick and cunning as a ferret; Sibbald might have escaped the carnage as he himself had done; young Lewis Gordon he could win to his side as he had done before; the Mac- kenzies would certainly get their marching orders from Seaforth and come in to him, – yes, it could all begin again then, starting clean and clear and with the right material this time, instead of those poor wretched men of Orkney and the handful of foreign infantry.

  So he stood still, with hope raising his heart and his eyes to the hills from whence would come his help.

  The land before him was opening further and further into the distance as the gates of the rain drew back from before it; he saw a long deep blue line of hills with the evening light behind them; and in that light, still further hills of palest unearthly blue, the hills of a further land beyond this world, the Promised Land that his Highlanders believed lay in the west and showed itself but once in a lifetime to mortal eyes.

  ‘My soul, there is a country

  Far beyond the stars.’

  He had come to his promised land, the haven where he would be.

  But now the nearer clouds were rising on either side of him, lit with the colours of flame and blood, and behind them, still wreathed in their stormy colours, there rose vast shapes that seemed higher and more monstrous than those of any mountains he had ever seen in his own land. They mounted guard on either side of the valley down which he had been gazing; in front of them lay a black pit of shadow, the Valley of the Shadow among the flaming mountains of hell.

  For these terrible shapes were those of an unknown land.

  The wall of bluish rock he thought he knew had receded into the distance as the nearer scene grew clear; he now saw its summit jagging against the sky, and saw that it was a huge mountain all of rock, and the patches of bright moss must be full-grown trees, and the steps like a staircase were steep precipices.

  He stood on that bare hillside, looking across the valley at the awful sunset that revealed these strange giants to him. He knew now that he had walked into an unknown and trackless wilderness, knew that he was lost. He had reached the end of his world. There was no more hope for him. ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’

  V

  Something was pushing him, tugging him back to life. He tried to resist, but the agony that was consciousness began to creep back into his veins; he heard a groan and knew it to be his own voice; he felt a warm panting breath and something wet, soft, insistent, nuzzling at his face and neck; he opened his eyes and saw the woolly head of a sheep-dog close to his own. A shepherd in a ragged plaid, his hair and beard as shaggy as his dog, was leaning over him and spoke to him, but his voice now boomed in his ears and now faded away to nothing, and Montrose could make out nothing that he said.

  The shepherd knelt beside him and began to pull him on to his feet; he got his arm round him under his shoulders so that Montrose’s weight was leaning over on to him, and thus, half dragging him, got him over the ground. He did not know how far they went, nor how long.

  Behind a huge boulder of rock there crouched a shieling built of shapeless lumps of stones piled together without mortar, roofed with grassy turf, and somewhere in the middle of it was stuck the end of a hollow trunk of tree as chimney.

  The door opened on to a blur of shadow and red light from the smouldering peats that lay on the bare floor without any hearthstone. A woman whose hollow cheekbones and gaunt skull-shaped head seemed carved out of the darkness, came towards him, stretching thin claw-like hands to help him down on to the creepie-stool by the fire. Little bright faces peeped out at him from behind her shadowy skirts, the faces of children that ran away on their bare feet as lightly as blown feathers as soon as he looked at them. Those thin hands were stretched out to him again, holding a bowl of warm milk.

  ‘Mammie, Mammie, it’s our supper you are giving him!’ came whispers behind her in the Gaelic which Montrose knew well.

  ‘And would you deny it to the poor gentleman, and he dying famished of cold and hunger?’

  ‘Yon’s no gentleman. Look at his ragged plaid.’
/>   ‘Look at himself, and say he’s no gentleman!’

  He drank the milk, he ate a small piece of oat-cake she gave him; he saw the woman clearly now and her husband beside her. He looked into their faces, and said, ‘I am Montrose and I have lost the fight at Corbiesdale. How far am I from there?’

  ‘Near thirty mile,’ said the shepherd.

  ‘Where am I then?’

  ‘Near Assynt.’

  Then he had walked neither north nor south, but, in as far as he had kept any straight direction, due west. But he could not think about it now; the warmth of the fire and the taste of food was bringing back that blinding desire to sleep that had beset him even in the rain and wind. The man asked him about the battle; the news of it had reached here, so indeed had some of Strachan’s troopers who were searching out the fugitives in all directions.

  But Montrose scarcely heard him, and they stared in concern at the gaunt face that showed grey-white beneath its three-day stubble of beard, and the eyes, bright with fever, sunk in their deep hollows. They laid him down by the fire with some rags under him and an extra plaid over him as soon as his soaked clothes had begun to dry, the steam of the wet wool rising in clouds by the fire.

  Before they did so, he had already fallen into a sleep so deep and dead that nothing, it seemed, would ever drag him out of it. He felt them trying to do so, but shook their hands off his shoulders and fell asleep again; he saw the cold light of dawn in the room for an instant and heard their voices hissing into his ears, ‘There are troopers on the hill, they are coming to this house,’ and his head rolled back on the floor and he was asleep again. They dragged and rolled him to the side of the wall and pulled him into an empty trough and heaped some straw over him, and at once he was asleep again.

  But soon there was the jingle of harness outside the hovel, and the tiny room was filled with tramping footsteps and the clank of spurs and loud bullying voices. That woke him at last; he lay in the dead darkness under the straw in the trough and heard a whispering patter of Gaelic from the children, and the shepherd and his wife swearing that they had not seen nor helped any fugitive from the battle.