Part 14 (1/2)

”There is something else. Look at your tablets, Miss Gale.”

”Oh yes,” said Miss Gale. ”Here it is--Flute.”

Kenneth had the flute in his pocket. He was a marvellous player for a boy. His whole soul seemed to breathe through the instrument.

To-day he played a battle-piece of his own putting together--not composing.

First came the gathering of the clans, bold, energetic, soul-touching, then the plaintive farewell to native glens, as the Highlanders marched away,--

”Maybe to return to Lochaber no more.”

Next came the spirited march, then the wilder pibroch as the foe was sighted, then wilder rus.h.i.+ng music still; the fight was going on now, you could feel that. You could hear the shrill slogan of the Highlander mingling with shout of victor and shriek of wounded. Then a pause, and anon the coronach or wail for the dead.

And so the music died away.

Down the glen now the party went, for the sun was sinking low in the west, and the fairy glen was miles from the clachan.

But Jessie must see the sheep. Dugald was acting as shepherd to-day, and doffed his Highland bonnet as the ladies approached him.

There was not a sheep there that Kenneth did not know. They bleated a kindly welcome as he approached. They even played with Kooran, making great pretence to knock him down or to hit him with their hard feet, all of which Kooran took in good part, and kindly pretended to run from them, then turning and barking in a funny remonstrative voice, as if he really were laughing at heart, and enjoyed the fun immensely, and I have no doubt he did.

Dugald took Kenneth aside.

”There is bad news come,” he said; ”all is lost. The glen is to be evicted.”

Kenneth's heart sank within him.

The cloud then that had been gathering so long was about to burst.

It was well-nigh a year since the tenantry had been asked to leave.

They heeded not the summons. They could not believe that their own auld laird McGregor would send his people away. Little they knew. McGregor would never appear among them again. The edict sent through him was sent by or at the instigation of the new American laird. The glens were no good to him with people in them--so he said--he must have deer; he was buying the land for the ”sport” it would afford him, his family and friends. Yet he doubted his own power, being a foreigner, to evict.

But that very day the last summons was given previous to forcible expulsion.

And the young men of the clachan and glens were wild. They would stand by their homesteads, they would grasp dirk and claymore, they would fight, they would die where they stood.

But at the great meeting that took place the wisdom of the grey-haired prevailed. And with sorrow, ay, and tears, they all came at last to the conclusion that resistance would be worse than useless.

They would not go till they were forced, they would stay and see the last of the dear old spot, but they would bend their necks to the yoke, they would maintain a pa.s.sive att.i.tude.

In this they showed their wisdom. The auld laird McGregor sent them a most affecting letter. ”Their sorrows,” it ended, ”and his own misfortune had broken his heart, and though he could see them no more in life, his thoughts and mind were with them.”

True, for the auld laird lived scarcely a year after the eviction of Glen Alva.

But with a portion of the remains of his fortune he paid the pa.s.sage money to America of as many of his tenants as were willing to accept his offer.

I would not harrow the feelings of my readers by describing the last sad scene in Glen Alva, when in the darkness of night the people were turned out; when more than seventy houses--well, call them huts, they were homesteads, at all events--were given to the flames; when the aged and the sick were laid on the bare hillside to s.h.i.+ver and to die; and when neither the wail of the widow nor plaintive cry of the suffering infant could move to pity or mercy the minions of the Yankee laird, who preferred deer to human beings.

Selah!

CHAPTER TEN.