Chapter II

THE FEUDAL LORDS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Turning our steps homeward, after a day of wandering and fishing, we traversed the Braes of Glen Ora, a wild and desolate scene, such as Horatio Mac Culloch would love to paint, tufted by broom and whin; torn by savage watercourses, all yellow marl and gravel, swept by the foaming torrent, or jagged by ghastly rocks, silence on every hand, and a deep shadow over all, save where a golden gleam of light that shot between the black and distant peaks of the west, tipped the points of the purple heather with fire, and edged the scattered rocks with the last glow of the sun that had set.

Here and there, throughout this desolate tract, on which the shadows of night were descending, were blacker spots, that marked where, in the preceding year, the houses of nearly fifty crofters had been levelled or burned. No tongue was required to tell us the terrible story of legal wrong, and worse than feudal tyranny inflicted on the unresisting poor. The blackened rafters were lying on every hand among the long grass, and thrown far asunder; the humble walls were half levelled and overgrown by weeds, like the hearths around which generations had sat, and told or sung of the past memories of the Gael and the kindly chiefs of other times, in the long nights of winter, when Ben Ora was mantled by snow, and the frozen cascade hung over the rocks, white as the beard of Ossian. Here a currant-bush, or there an apple-tree, still marked amid the weeds and heather where the garden of the peasant had been. Elsewhere the glen was yet dotted by little patches of corn and potatoes, all growing wild; but where were those who had sown and planted them?

Driven from their native land to make way for sheep, or grouse, or deer, and packed in ships, like slaves for the Cuban market, the old people of the glen, the women and children, were pining on the banks of the Susquehanna; while the young and able were forced by starvation, or lured by false promises, into the ranks of the Sutherland Highlanders, and were now away to fight the Russians in the East. Thus it is that the game-laws, centralization, wilful neglect, and maladministration, reduce the people of the glens to misery, starvation, and inability to pay the exorbitant rents demanded for their little farms; then their dwellings are demolished, and themselves expelled, that one vast game preserve may be made of the land which has given to the British service nearly ninety of its finest battalions of infantry.

"Clanchattan is broken, the Seaforth bends low,
The sun of Clan Ronald is sinking in labour,
Glencoe and Clan Donoquhy, what are they now?
And where is bold Keppoch, the Lord of Lochaber?
All gone with the House they supported, laid low!
While the Dogs of the South their bold life-blood were lapping,
Trod down by a fierce and a merciless foe;
The brave are all gone, with the Stuarts of Appin!"

'My God!' exclaimed Callum, with deep emotion, as he looked around him, with a fierce and saddened eye, 'who now could think this place had given three hundred swordsmen to Glenfinnon?'

'And sent two hundred with my father to Egypt?' added I.

'Better had he and they stayed at home; for the Mac Innons might yet have brooked the land their fathers sprang from.'

Callum Dhu felt, as he spoke, like a true Celt--believing that our ancestors sprang from the soil; _i.e._ were the old and original race, without predecessors.

My father, the youngest of the two sons of Alaster Mac Innon, of Glen Ora, was an officer of the 42nd Highlanders, who served under Abercromby in Egypt and Wellington in Spain. His elder brother belonged, unfortunately, to the Scots Fusilier Guards, and amid the dissipation of a London life, 'in rivalling the follies of his equals in birth and superiors in fortune,' soon wasted his small but ancient patrimony, which, though it could once bring 600 swordsmen to the king's host, in more modern times did not produce more than 600_l._ yearly rent.

Glen Ora was not entailed, thus its broad acres of heather and whinstone-rock, mountain and torrent, slipped from under the hands of my gay uncle like a moving panorama; he died early, and the estate passed away to strangers. The old tower was demolished, and a hunting-seat built on its site, by a noble duke, whose family had enriched their pockets, if not their blood, by intermarriage with the tribe of Levi. Then began the war of extermination and expatriation in the north; and while the authoress of "Uncle Tom" was feasted and slavery reviled in the coteries of the Duchess in London, fire, sword, and eviction were enforced by Mr. Snaggs, her factor, in Glen Ora. Thus had things continued until the preceding year, when the estate was purchased by Sir Horace Everingham, of Elton Hall, Yorkshire.

My father had died on service with his regiment in Jamaica, when the yellow flag waved on Up-park Camp, and the Highland bonnets lay as thick in the yard of the pest-stricken barracks as ever they have been on the battle-field; and my mother, a Stuart, of Appin, brought me home to Glen Ora, where, with the pension of a captain's widow, she endeavoured to eke out a subsistence among our own people, and occupied as a farm, at a small rental, the thatched mansion, which in better times was the jointure-house of our family.

But a ukase had gone forth! The whole country was doomed to become a deer-forest, desolate and wild as when the first Fergus and his bare-kneed Scots landed on its shores, which perhaps no foot had trod since the waters of the Flood had left them.

The men of Glentuirc, a sept of our race, had already been swept away, and now those of Glen Ora were to follow.

As a necessary preliminary the rents had been doubled and trebled, until we were incapable of satisfying the rapacity of this alien lord, whose feudal charters gave him a more than imperial power over us. A blight had fallen on our little corn-patches; several of our sheep had been smothered in the snow, and other troubles and difficulties fell thick and fast upon us. In vain Ephraim Snaggs, the factor, was prayed for mercy; but to seek it from that astute writer to the signet and grim elder of the kirk, was 'to take a bone from a tiger.'

The olden times were gone! For ages unnumbered the Highland landlord deemed that wealth consisted in the number of families, and troops of chubby children who lived upon his lands; farms were divided and subdivided in the fertile glens, until 'every rood of land maintained its man;' and on every lot and rood was a tenant--a hardy soldier, a tiller of the soil, and the father of a sturdy and a faithful race. The laird valued his property not by the rent-roll, but by the number of brave and leal-hearted swordsmen whose homes were made thereon. This was the patriarchal system, old as the world before the Flood; for feudality, with its barbarism, its imaginary rights and slavish tenures, its monkish parchments and legal villany, was unknown in the Highlands until a comparatively recent period; and then, noble was the struggle made against it by the Wallace of the Celtic tribes, John of Moidart, who expelled and slew his nephew Ronald Galda, for accepting from James V. a feudal charter of the lands which belonged to the tribe of which he, Ronald, was the chief. In this spirit, the Highland peasant has a hereditary right to his hut--a right derived from God--but kings have given our feudal lords, even in the nineteenth century, a power over the land on which the hut is built; and at their behest whole villages are demolished, and the people swept away with a heartless barbarity sufficient to call down the lasting vengeance of heaven on the ignoble dukes and canting marquises of the northern and western Highlands!

But to resume:--

After traversing this Serbonian waste for a mile or two, we reached a little cot built under the brow of a rock; large blocks of whinstone, with a few courses of turf above them, bedded in clay, formed the walls; the roof, which was composed of divot, fern, and straw, all firmly tied by ropes of heather, was covered by moss of the richest emerald green. It was a humble dwelling, with a little window of one pane, on each side of a rude door composed of three planks nailed on bars; yet Callum Dhu, who had lived here alone since his mother's death, never closed it at meal-time, without coming forth to the road, in the hospitable old Celtic spirit, to see if a stranger or wayfarer were in sight.

Here we parted, as I resisted all his kind invitations to enter, though the poor fellow had but little to offer me; nor would I permit him to escort me home, as he was weary after a long day of wandering. Callum Mac Ian, the descendant of our hereditary henchman, now supported himself by killing foxes, weasels, and wild cats; for which, as these vermin were very destructive, (especially the former among the sheep,) he received a small sum from each cot-farmer in Glen Ora. This contribution, with a little patch of potatoes, cultivated by himself, enabled him to live; but as Callum occasionally took a shot at other quadrupeds which were not considered vermin, he was continually in scrapes and broils with the keepers of the duke, the marquis, the laird, and other adjoining potentates, whose ancestors, by force or fraud, had partitioned the land of the Mac Innons, as the powers of Europe did Poland.

'My love to dear Minnie,' said he, touching his bonnet in the dark, as I left him; 'I would she were here with me, for the cottage is dreary since my poor mother went to the place of sleep on the hill; but _achial_, Mac Innon! this is not a time in Glen Ora for marrying or giving in marriage.'

Minnie was my mother's maid, and the object of my foster-brother's boyish attachment. They had long loved each other, and had solemnly plighted their troth by joining hands through the hole of the Clach-na-Greiné; but Snaggs was their evil genius; for with the daily dread of eviction and proscription hanging over him, how could Callum pay the illegally-levied marriage-tax of forty shillings, or bring a wife under the caber of his hut, or ask leave to add one foot in breadth to his little patch of potatoes and kail?

In a few minutes after, I stood at my mother's door.