Flower o' the Heather: A Story of the Killing Times, Page 2

  *CHAPTER II*

  *TROOPER BRYDEN OF LAG'S HORSE*

  After the cloistered quiet of Balliol I found my new life passingstrange.

  Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, our Commanding Officer, was a good soldier,a martinet and a firm believer in the power of the iron hand. He was,we knew, held in high favour by the authorities, and he had been granteda commission to stamp out, by all means in his power, the pestilent andbigoted pack of rebels in Dumfriesshire and Galloway who calledthemselves Covenanters. He was quick of temper, but he did not lack akind of sardonic humour, nor was he without bravery. A King's man tothe core, he never troubled his mind with empty questionings; his orderswere to put down rebellion and to crush the Covenanters, and that wasenough for him.

  My fellow-troopers interested me. Some of them were soldiers of fortunewho had fought upon the Continent of Europe--hard-bitten men, full ofstrange oaths and stranger tales of bloody fights fought on alien soil.In their eyes the life of a soldier was the only life worth living, andthey held in contempt less bellicose mortals who were content to spendtheir days in the paths of peace. Of the rest, some were Highlanders,dreamy-eyed creatures of their emotions, in which they reined in with afirm hand in the presence of any Lowlander, but to which they gave freevent when much liquor had loosened their tongues. Brave men all--fromtheir youth accustomed to hardship and bloodshed--fighting was as thebreath of their nostrils. To me, accustomed to the milder ales ofEngland, their capacity for the strong waters of the North was arevelation. They could drink, undiluted, fiery spirits of a potency andin a quantity that would have killed me. I never saw one drunk; and atthe end of an evening of heavy indulgence there was not a man among thembut could stand steady upon his feet and find his way unaided back tobillets. So far as I could see the only effect of their potations wasthat after the fourth or fifth pot they became musical and would singlove-songs in the Gaelic tongue with a moisture gathering in their eyeslike dewdrops. After that they tended to become theological, and wouldargue angrily on points of doctrine too abstruse for me to follow. TheLowlanders were a curious mixture of sentimentality and soundcommon-sense. They carried their drink less well than the Highlanders,but they too were men of unusual capacity--at least to my way ofthinking--and always passed through a theological phase on their way toa condition of drunkenness.

  I do not know whether my companions found as much interest in studyingme as I derived from observing them. Probably they pitied me, as theHighlanders did the Lowlanders. I had not been born in Scotland: that,in their eyes, was a misfortune which almost amounted to a disgrace. Myincapacity to rival them in their potations, and my inability to takepart in their theological discussions, made them regard me withsomething akin to contempt. Once I overheard a Highlander whisper to aLowlander, "Surely she iss a feckless creature," and I guessed with afeeling of abasement that he was speaking of me. On the whole, theytreated me with a rude kindliness, doing all they could to make meacquainted with the elements of the rough-and-ready discipline which wasthe standard of the troop, and protecting my ignorance, whenever theydared, from the harsh tongue of the sergeant-major.

  We were mounted men, but our weapons were those of foot-soldiers. Ourhorses, stout little nags, known as Galloways, were simply our means ofconveyance from place to place. If we had been called upon to fight, weshould probably have fought on foot, and we were armed accordingly, withlong muskets which we bore either slung across our shoulders orsuspended muzzle-downwards from our saddle-peaks.

  Equipped for rapid movement, we carried little with us save our weapons:but under his saddle-flap each dragoon had a broad metal plate, andbehind the saddle was hung a bag of oatmeal. When we bivouacked in theopen, as many a time we did, each trooper made for himself on his plate,heated over a camp fire, a farle or two of oat-cake, and with thisstaved off the pangs of hunger. It was, as the sergeant had said, aman's life--devoid of luxury, compact of hardship and scanty feeding,with little relaxation save what we could find in the taverns of thetowns or villages where we halted for a time.

  In my ignorance, I had thought that when we set out from Dumfries tomarch through Galloway we should find, opposed to us somewhere, a forceof Covenanters who would give battle. I had imagined that these rebelswould have an army of their own ready to challenge the forces of theKing: but soon I learned that our warfare was an inglorious campaignagainst unarmed men and women. We were little more than inquisitors.In the quiet of an afternoon we would clatter up some lonely road to awhite farm-house--the hens scattering in terror before us--and draw reinin the cobbled court-yard.

  Lag would hammer imperiously upon the half-open door, and a terrifiedwoman would answer the summons.

  "Whaur's the guid-man?" he would cry, and when the good-wife could findspeech she would answer:

  "He's up on the hills wi' the sheep."

  "Think ye," Lag would say, "will he tak' the Test?"

  "Ay, he wull that. He's nae Whig, but a King's man is John,"--and toput her words to the proof we would search the hills till we found him.When found, if he took "The Test," which seemed to me for the most partto be an oath of allegiance to the King, with a promise to have nodealings with the pestilent Covenanters, we molested him no further, andLag would sometimes pass a word of praise upon his sheep or his cattle,which would please the good-man mightily.

  But often our raids had a less happy issue. As we drew near to a house,we would see a figure steal hastily from it, and we knew that we wereupon the track of a villainous Covenanter. Then we would spur ourhorses to the gallop and give chase: and what a dance these hill-mencould lead us. Some of them had the speed of hares and could leap likeyoung deer over boulders and streams where no horse could follow. Many asturdy nag crashed to the ground, flinging its rider who had spurred itto the impossible; and if the fugitive succeeded in reaching the vastopen spaces of the moorland, many a good horse floundered in the bogs tothe great danger of its master, while the fleet-footed Covenanter, whoknew every inch of the ground, would leap from tussock to tussock offirm grass, and far out-distance us.

  Or again, we would learn that someone--a suspect--was hiding upon themoors, and for days we would search, quartering and requartering thegreat stretches of heather and bog-land till we were satisfied that ourquarry had eluded us--or until, as often happened, we found him.Sometimes it was an old man, stricken with years, so that he could nottake to flight: sometimes it was a mere stripling--a lad of my ownage--surrounded in his sleep and taken ere he could flee. The measure ofjustice meted to each was the same.

  "Will ye tak' the Test?" If not--death, on the vacant moor, at thehands of men who were at once his accusers, his judges, and hisexecutioners.

  Sometimes when a fugitive had refused the Test, and so proclaimedhimself a Covenanter, Lag would promise him his life if he woulddisclose the whereabouts of some others of more moment than himself. Butnever did I know one of them play the coward: never did I hear onebetray another. Three minutes to prepare himself for death: and hewould take his bonnet off and turn a fearless face up to the open sky.

  And then Lag's voice--breaking in upon the holy silence of the moorlandlike a clap of thunder in a cloudless sky--"Musketeers! Poise yourmuskets! make ready: present, give fire!" and another rebel would falldead among the heather.

  The scene used to sicken me, so that I could hardly keep my seat in thesaddle, and in my heart I thanked God that I was judged too unskilful asyet to be chosen as one of the firing party. That, of course, wasnothing more than sentiment. These men were rebels, opposed to theKing's Government, and such malignant fellows well deserved their fate.Yet there began to spring up within me some admiration for theirbravery. Not one of them was afraid to die.

  Sometimes, of a night, before sleep came to me, I would review theevents of the day--not willingly, for the long and grisly tale of horrorwas one that no man would of set purpose dwell upon, but because in mysoul I had begun to doubt the quality of the j
ustice we meted out. Itwas a dangerous mood for one who had sworn allegiance to the King, andtaken service under his standard: but I found myself beginning to wonderwhether the people whom we were harrying so mercilessly and putting todeath with as little compunction as though they had been reptilesinstead of hard-working and thrifty folk--as their little farms andhouses proved--were rebels in any real sense. I had no knowledge, asyet, of what had gone before, and I was afraid to ask any of my fellows,lest my questioning should bring doubt upon my own loyalty. But Iwondered why these men, some gone far in eld and others in the morningof their days, were ready to die rather than say the few words thatwould give them life and liberty. Gradually the light broke through thedarkness of my thoughts, and I began to understand that in their bearingthere was something more than mere disloyalty to the King. They diedunflinching, because they were loyal to some ideal that was moreprecious to them than life, and which torture and the prospect of deathcould not make them forswear. Were they wrong? Who was I, to judge? Iknew nothing of their history, and when first I set out with Lag's HorseI cared as little. I had ridden forth to do battle against rebels. Ifound myself one of a band engaged in the hideous task of exercisingduress upon other men's consciences. The thought was not a pleasantone, and I tried to banish it, but it would come back to me in the stillwatches when no sound was audible but the heavy breathing of my sleepingcompanions,--and no sophistry sufficed to stifle it.

  Day after day we continued our march westward through Galloway, leavingbehind us a track of burning homesteads, with here and there a starkfigure, supine, with a bloody gash in his breast, and a weary faceturned up to the eternal sky. The sky was laughing in the May sunshine:the blue hyacinths clustered like a low-lying cloud of peat-smoke in thewoods by the roadside, and the larks cast the gold of their song intothe sea of the air beneath them. The whole earth was full of joy andbeauty; but where we passed, we left desolation, and blood and tears.

  As the sun was setting we rode down the valley of the Cree, whosepeat-dyed water, reddened by the glare in the sky, spoke silently of theblood-stained moors which it had traversed in its course. A river ofblood: a fitting presage of the duties of the morrow that had brought usto Wigtown!