Chapter II: Hawke Holcroft

The process of creeping in serpent fashion over sharp-pointed heather, rough stones, and occasionally in the bed of a mountain stream, as we have already described, proved intensely tiresome and distasteful to a 'man about town' like Mr. Hawke Holcroft, who could not entirely conceal his genuine disgust thereat, and at the slowness of the whole affair, though reminded by Dugald's son Angus, a smart young under-keeper, of the big hart of Benmore, which was stalked for seven long summer days before it was killed.

'But, for the Lord's sake, sir, keep quiet,' whispered Angus. 'We are now close on one of the finest of Macgilony's dun cows.'

'I see no dun cow!' grumbled Holcroft.

'He means yonder deer,' whispered Cameron, a fair-haired and pleasant-looking fellow. 'Macgilony was a famous hunter in the olden time, and his dun cows, as he called them, were the red deer of the Grampians.'

But to Holcroft, whose idea of hunting the stag was to have a scared and bewildered creature--a fallow deer, fed on oats and hay, perhaps--cast loose from a game-cart in a smooth, grassy park, the perseverance, courage, and labour required for stalking in the Highlands seemed a simple waste of time and an inconceivable bore.

'Stop for a minute,' whispered Angus, as they crept _up the wind_; 'the stag can smell with more than its nostrils.'

As the stoppage took place directly in the bed of a brawling burn, where they all lay on their stomachs, Holcroft not unnaturally asked, with no small irritation, what he meant; and the wiry young Highlander, who was whiskered and moustached to such an extent that, with his shaggy eyebrows, he somewhat resembled a Skye terrier in visage, explained his theory--no uncommon one, though, of course, not admitted by naturalists--that the red deer can both smell and breathe through the curious aperture beneath each eye, even if their heads are immersed in water when in the act of drinking.

'Dioul!' muttered Angus, as they crept forward again, but on dry heather this time, 'we can't be too cautious, whateffer! A deer's eye is as keen as an eagle's, and his nose acute as that of a foumart.'

'The first shot shall be yours, Holcroft,' said Cameron. 'I shall reserve my fire. He seems a powerful animal, and, if you only wound him, we may have the devil to pay!'

'Thanks--but how?' whispered Holcroft.

'If the dogs bring him to bay, he may turn upon us ere another cartridge can be dropped in the barrel, and gore deep with his horns.'

English sportsmen generally prefer having the deer driven to stalking them, for the bodily exertion requisite in the latter case tries so severely every muscle and sinew; but, to the true Highland hunter, one deer shot after a long and adventurous stalk, is worth a hundred knocked over after a successful drive by gillies, when the herd is urged in wild confusion through some narrow pass well garrisoned by breech-loaders in secure ambush.

While Holcroft and Cameron crept softly forward nearer the browsing deer, the young keeper threw his plaid over the eyes of the staghound Shiuloch, and held it in by main strength, though his wrist was nearly dislocated by the strain of the leash, and the ill-suppressed whimpers of the animal were lost amid its muffling.

'Now,' whispered Angus, hoarsely, full of excitement--'now is your time, sir!'

Holcroft took a long aim; in his intense anxiety, and perhaps inspired by vanity, he overdid his aim; he fired at the precise moment Allan's shot was heard in the distant corrie, but only wounded the stag in the shoulder, and, just as he let fly the contents of the other barrel (and missed), it fled away with the speed of the wind, followed by the swift and powerful hound, which, quick as thought, Angus let slip, and both vanished down a deep glen, overhung by silver birches, close by.

'_Ohone a Dhia!_ but he has missed it, after all--it is no use guiding a Sassenach whateffer!' muttered Angus, under his thick, ruddy moustache; yet, as Cameron could read by the expression that twinkled in his hazel eyes, secretly not ill-pleased at the result, however.

'I almost did it--hit him, at all events!' said Holcroft, with intense mortification, as he was too much of an Englishman not to wish to excel in everything that appertained to sport.

'Almost!' repeated Angus, who added to Cameron, in a low voice, "_Cha d'rinse theob riomh sealg!_" (_i.e._, Almost, never killed the game).

'Better luck next time,' said the young Laird of Stratherroch, consolingly. 'Allan has knocked over his deer, I see.'

'Attempt and Did-not were the two worst hounds of Fingal,' muttered Angus, in his Perthshire Gaelic, with a furtive glance, fall of meaning, at Stratherroch.

'To the genuine Highlander,' says a recent English writer, 'it is a fixed article of belief that there never yet was a Sassenach who knew more about the wind and weather, or about the innumerable other mysteries which furnish the stalker with the tact and skill required to perfect him in his difficult craft, than a cow understands of conic sections. With true Celtic caution and prudence, the gillies tolerate the opulent tenant from the south out of respect for his cheque-book and his frequent drafts upon it; but in their hearts they look upon him as an _intruder_, and are not sorry when they contemplate his receding form, as he turns his face homewards, and leaves moor, loch, and mountain, glen and forest to 'their natural denizens.'

And in this spirit Angus was secretly regarding the unconscious Mr. Holcroft, who had the genuine Southern idea that no man of woman born could undervalue him.

So the little shooting-party united now, and, not unwillingly, all sat down to have luncheon, as they were sharply appetised by long exercise in the keen mountain air, and on no other tablecloth than the purple heather; the ample contents of a hamper--game pies, cold beef, bread, champagne (cooled in an adjacent runnel), whisky, and so forth--were laid out by the active hands of the gillies, expectant of their own repast when the time came.

They lunched near the mossy ruins of a clachan--some of those melancholy ruins so common over all the Highlands, the traces of a departed people who have passed away to other lands, evicted by grasping selfishness to make way for grouse and deer.

There, the low, shattered gables, an old well, some gooseberry bushes that marked 'where a garden had been,' were all that remained of a once populous village, whose men had often gone forth to fight for Scotland in the wars of old, and whose descendants in latter years had manned more than one company of the Black Watch in Egypt and the Peninsula.

On the sunny hill-slope close by, a ruined wall, low and circular--above which appeared the grey arms of a solitary Celtic cross, an aged yew-tree, and where long grass waved in the wind--marked where lay the last of the clan, whom no human power could evict or send towards the setting sun; and these imparted a melancholy to the solemn scenery, for solemn it was with all its beauty.

It was of that kind peculiar to some parts of Perthshire, where the subordinate hills, rising a thousand feet and more above the valley, are entirely covered with dusky pines, taking away all that appearance of blackness and desolation presented by naked mountain masses, and adding softness and beauty to the landscape, which would otherwise be stern and grim. Nor were the glassy loch and the murmuring torrent wanting there, nor those passes where the mountains approach each other, and make them, like that of Killiecrankie, excel even the famous Vale of Tempe.

Though not very impressionable by Nature, Holcroft, influenced by the good things he was imbibing, said something about the beauty of the scenery, to which Lord Aberfeldie responded, adding, with a laugh,

'I do enjoy life in a shooting-box, and of all the entrancing sports to me there is none like stalking the deer.'

With his sodden knickerbocker suit drying slowly upon him in the mountain wind, Holcroft could only assent to this faintly, and wished, perhaps, that, like Stratherroch, he wore a kilt, and could wring the water out of the plaits thereof.

'Of old in Scotland,' resumed Lord Aberfeldie, as he lit his briar-root pipe, 'no man was deemed perfect in the craft of hunting till he had landed a salmon from the pool, shot an eagle on the wing, and killed a stag. But, when here in a shooting-box, I always thank heaven that I am at least fifteen miles from a telegraph wire, that letters can only come once a day, and just before dinner, and bills and lawyers' letters seldom or never at all. Have a glass of something before you lunch, Dugald,' he said, addressing his venerable keeper; 'I know you will prefer Glenlivet to all the Clicquot and Moet in the world.'

'A cless, thank you kindly, my lord,' replied Dugald, touching his bonnet, 'though my mouth can hold more of whateffer it be.'

And, bowing to the company, Dugald drained it in quick time.

'I daresay, Holcroft,' said Allan, 'you would prefer the deer driven to being stalked?'

'Infinitely!' replied the other, as he quaffed a bumper of sparkling Moselle.

'Well, I for one do not,' said the Master, emphatically.

'The Highlander of old would follow a stag for days, or even for weeks, if necessary,' observed Lord Aberfeldie, with kindling eyes, 'sleeping in his plaid among the heather, he would lie where night found him. With his long gaff he would catch a salmon between the water and the sky; but when stalking he had no conception of the brutal German battues now so common in the Highlands, and so degrading to sport,' he added; in his energy, forgetting that there was something of rebuke in his remarks, which certainly made Holcroft's cheek redden with annoyance, and his rather shifty eyes to lower.

The Master, aware that this subject was rather a hobby with his father, hastened to change the conversation by observing,

'How strange it seems, Stratherroch, that you and I should be so suddenly here after all these past years with the regiment--here among the purple heather and green bracken again.'

'And a few weeks hence will see us with it again, and back to the old pipe-clay routine,' said Cameron.

'Regiments are now no longer what they were in my time,' said Lord Aberfeldie, a little irrelevantly, perhaps, but pursuing his own ideas. 'Examinations, cramming and useless pedantry, promotion by selection and compulsory retirement for the officers, with short service among the men, render corps no longer what they were in the old days, each a happy, movable home. The time when a young officer often said, with just pride and noble ambition, "My father and my grandfather have both commanded _this_ regiment, and, please God, I hope at some period to do the same," can never come again! And what Highland officer now, in the Black Watch or any other of our national regiments, is followed to the colours by a band of his own name and kindred, or can speak of his comrades as "my father's people," or "the men from our glen;" and yet such was the case when yonder ruined clachan was instinct with village life, and the voices of children were heard around its humble hearths.'

'The hero of Ghuznee had a theory that no Scotsman was fitted to command a regiment,' said Stratherroch, laughing.

'I know that he detested Scotsmen, and brought six officers, all Scotsmen, to a court-martial; and it was then he is said to have made the statement which cost him so dear in India.'

'How?' asked Holcroft.

'Because, within an hour after, old Colonel Wemyss, of the 52nd, paraded him in rear of the cantonment, and planted a bullet in his body by way of curing him of prejudice for the future. Rather a convincing argument, old Wemyss thought it,' added Aberfeldie, laughing, as he knocked the ashes from his cherished briar-root, put it in its case, and dropped it into his silver-mounted sporran.

'Talking of regiments, I saw yours at Portsmouth, Graham,' said Holcroft; 'and I thought the men looked graceful indeed, with their kilts over their left shoulders and their black sporrans waving above their bronzed faces.'

Whether this was meant as a joke or a sneer, it is impossible to say; but his hearers took it as the former, and laughed accordingly, on which Holcroft added,

'I mean their plaid-shawls over their shoulders. I remember that Miss Raymond laughed heartily when I made the same remark.'

'I don't wonder at that,' said Lord Aberfeldie. 'Olive is a girl who laughs on very slight occasions.'

'You have not seen her since your return,' said Holcroft to Allan Graham.

'No; but I shall very soon now.'

'She is a very handsome girl; what the deuce have the men been about to leave her all this time Miss Raymond?'

'All this time? Why, she has not yet seen her twentieth year,' exclaimed Allan, with some annoyance, as he thought of the photo.

'Her costumes are _chic_,' continued Holcroft, '_chic_ to a degree! How I admired her portrait in the Grosvenor Gallery; and wise was the artist to label it "Fair to See."'

Allan glanced at his father, and his face clouded to hear all this--praise though it was--in the mouth of Hawke Holcroft.

'You have an appreciation of beauty, apparently,' said young Cameron.

'Who has not? Thus, as Disraeli says, "the action of lovely woman on our destiny is increasing," and, as Miss Raymond----'

'I am Miss Raymond's uncle and guardian,' said Lord Aberfeldie, rather stiffly, and to Mr. Holcroft, as it seemed, a little irrelevantly, though cutting short whatever he meant to say; for the peer winced at the way in which his guest referred to his niece in the hearing of gillies and gamekeepers, and, more than all, in the presence of Allan, whose dark eyes wore rather a lowering expression; but, as all had hearty appetites after their recent exercise and long exposure in the keen, bracing mountain air of an autumn day, they were inclined to use their knives and forks rather than their tongues, and the subject, however pleasing to Mr. Holcroft, was dropped.

The latter was not a pleasing type of Englishman, though his air and bearing were thoroughly those of a gentleman. He had a good square figure, but his legs were somewhat of the spindle order, as his knickerbocker suit revealed. He was flaxen-haired, fair-skinned, and somewhat freckled, with a tawny moustache and pale grey eyes; and strange it was that these, though weak-looking, cunning, and shifty, would assume at times, but covertly, a defiant, even ferocious expression, if evil passions excited him.

He was almost destitute of eyebrows, but had a massive chin; and as Allan Graham regarded him, as he lay stretched upon the grass leisurely smoking, he by no means showed his father's sentiment of friendship for this son of an old friend; and there grew in his breast a mysterious instinct--almost a presentiment--that Holcroft would in some way or other bring trouble upon them conjunctly or severally.

After the keepers and gillies had their repast, the luncheon apparatus was packed up, and, shouldering their rifles, the party set out for the shooting-box, which was situated in a pretty glen a few miles distant.

Angus, who was--as his father boasted--strong as Cuchullin, again lifted the deer to the pony's back, and preceded by the family piper, Ronald Gair, with his pipes in full blast to the air of 'The Birks of Aberfeldie,' they departed down the winding path towards the dark blue loch that lay at the foot of the solemn, pine-clad hills.

Like the gillies and keepers, Ronald was never seen without a sprig of the _Buaidh craob na Laibhreis_ (the laurel-tree of victory), the badge of the Grahams, in his bonnet.

Ronald Gair's locks were silver now, but they had been dark enough when he played the Black Watch up the green slopes of the Alma, through all Central India, to the gates of Lucknow, and in later times to the corpse-encumbered swamps of Coomassie.

Holcroft winced at what he deemed the dissonance of the pipes, and cursed their sound in his heart; but he was too well-bred or too prudent to say anything on the subject as he strode by Cameron's side down the strath, with a huge regalia between his teeth. Indeed, he might have been pretty well used to their sound by this time, as Ronald Gair roused the household with them in the morning, preceded many a meal--dinner always--and seemed to spend most of his time in incessant 'tuning up' between.

'I have a suspicion that he is bad form, this Holcroft,' said Allan to his father, as they could converse, unheard by the other two, amid the din of the pipes, which Ronald blew as if to wake the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, or Holgar Danske in his cavern at Elsinore. 'I have heard that he half lives on play and his betting-book, and that his little place in Essex, or rather what remains of it, is dipped over head and ears. Indeed, he admitted jocularly to Cameron that it was mortgaged for thrice its value, three times over, a fact which would teach the holders prudence for the future. Why did you have him here or at Dundargue?'

'Well--his father and I were old friends, as you know; his father, in fact, by an act of great bravery, saved my life at the Alma, when three Russians were at the point of bayoneting me, as I lay helpless on the field; so you see, Allan, I cannot help being at least hospitable to the poor fellow, and certainly his friend.'

Indeed, Lord Aberfeldie had always been the latter to Holcroft, and not seldom his 'banker,' but of this Allan knew nothing, nor was ever likely to know, so far as his father was concerned.

'He seems to consider Olive an heiress,' said Allan, after a pause.

'As--of course--she is.'

'And he dared to speak of her under the slangy name of "cash" to Stratherroch, as I, by chance, overheard.'

Lord Aberfeldie knitted his dark brows, and said,

'I detest slang--it is deuced bad form; but Holcroft belongs, I know, to a horsey set.'

The sun was setting now, and gradually his crimson glory was paling in fire on the hill tops, till it faded out and died away, and the shadows of the September night crept upward step by step from the deep glens below, and one by one the stars came out above the trees--a sea of dark and solemn pines that covered all the mountain slopes--and ere long the red lights from the curtained windows of the luxurious shooting-lodge were seen to cast long lines of wavering radiance across the bosom of the loch, by the margin of which it stood.

Ere this, the great greyhound Shiuloch (whose name means speed) had returned, drenched with water (showing that he had pursued the stag into some distant loch) and bloody with more than one wound inflicted by antlers.

The sharp-set hunters had dined luxuriously, and cigars with brandy and soda had become the order of the night, when the Master said to his father,

'I think I have had enough of deer-stalking--three weeks nearly--and to-morrow I shall start for Dundargue.'

'I think you are wise to do so,' replied Lord Aberfeldie, with a pointed glance.

'Sorry to lose you, Graham,' said Holcroft, concealing under a bright smile his secret annoyance, envy, and alarm, of all which more anon.

In this sudden resolution Allan Graham was influenced, perhaps, by some remarks of his father, the viscount, and pique at those of Hawke Holcroft, together with a natural longing to see his mother and sister, and a growing consciousness that he had been somewhat remiss and, to say the least of it, ungallant to his cousin. Thus, next day, he took his departure for Dundargue; but he could little foresee all the bitter complications that were to arise, and to culminate in the future, through his merely lingering to stalk deer in his father's forest.

When he went off, none shook his hand more warmly than Hawke Holcroft, though the latter muttered under his breath,

'Fool that I was, not to make my innings before this fellow came; but if some people could be put out of the way, that others might take their place, how much pleasanter this world would be--to other people, at least.'

Little did the family of Aberfeldie know that in Hawke Holcroft they had among them an unscrupulous adventurer and most dangerous guest!