Chapter III: Mr. Ephraim Snaggs

Our residence, the old jointure-house, now shorn of its fair proportions, and diminished in aspect, since it was built for the widow of Lachlan Mohr Mac Innon, who led his clan to Worcester, was small, low in the roof, and heavily thatched with warm heather. The two principal rooms were wainscoted; the entrance was floored with hard-beaten clay, and above the door was a rudely-carved representation of the arms of Mac Innon, a boar's head erased, holding in its mouth the legbone of a deer, supported by a lion and, a leopard. This uncouth piece of heraldry, the pride of my mother's heart, was the _chef d'oeuvre_ of some local sculptor. The aspect of the house was cheerless and indicative of the decay that had fallen upon us; the carpets were faded and worn; the furniture antique and rickety; there were corner cupboards, where old china, worm-eaten books, bottles of whisky, powder-flasks, bullet-moulds, deer-horns, fishing-gear, teapots, and coffee-cups, dogs' collars, an old dirk and skene, mingled pell-mell with innumerable other etcetera.

Far off on the mountain slope, the strong square tower of Lachlan Mohr (who was besieged therein by the Campbells after Inverlochy) was a landmark for two hundred years; but now it was removed to make way for a modern mansion, the windows of which, on this evening, were brilliantly lighted up; and then, I doubted not, Sir Horace Everingham was sitting down to a sumptuous entertainment after his visit to Ben Ora, while I, the heir of all these hills and glens, had scarcely a crust to place before me.

I thought of all these things--the present and the past--with a bitterness renewed by the recent conversation with my foster-brother. I tossed aside my fishing-gear, basket, and bonnet, and with a sigh of weariness and dejection, entered the half-dilapidated mansion. As I had been abroad the whole day, I sought, with some anxiety, the apartment of my sick and aged mother. I heard the sound of voices proceeding from it; she was expostulating, and a stranger was threatening! I made a forward stride, when a hand was timidly laid on my arm; I turned, and met the anxious face of pretty Minnie Mac Omish.

'A chial! a chial!' she whispered, with tears in her soft hazel eyes; 'Snaggs, the factor, is with your mother, Allan, and I fear he brings bad news.'

'Can other come to us now, Minnie?' said I; 'but take my fish-basket--I have brought a good stipper from the Uisc Dhu and Loch Ora.'

I then entered the little dining-room where we usually had all our meals served up.

I see it yet in memory.

Like many apartments in old Highland houses, its ceiling was low, pannelled with fir, and painted in a dull white colour; the stone fireplace, heavily moulded, bore the motto of the Mac Innons, _Cuimhuich bas Alpin_, in raised letters, and the grate, a little brass-knobbed basket, at which, as my nurse affirmed, Prince Charles had once warmed his royal feet, stood upon two blocks of stone. A few old prints of battles in black frames, an oil-portrait or two, an old ebony table, with a huge family-bible, an inverted punch-bowl cracked and riveted, chairs of a fashion that has long since disappeared from the Lowlands, made up the plenishing of this little chamber, which was alike my mother's dining-room and peculiar sanctum sanctorum--and the palladium of which, were the old gilt gorget and regimental claymore of my father, suspended above the chimney-piece. He had worn these during the campaigns with the Black Watch in Egypt and in Spain.

With gold spectacles on nose, my mother, a thin, pale woman of a dignified aspect, in an old-fashioned costume, with black silk _mittens_ on her hands, was seated in her cushioned chair, affecting to work at some ornament or article of attire, which lay on a little tripod table. She seemed nervous and agitated; how could she be otherwise, when opposite sat he, who was the horror of the glens from Lochness to Loch Ora--Ephraim Snaggs, with his malevolent visage, perched on the top of a bamboo-cane, over the silver knob of which his hands were crossed.

Bald-headed, hollow in the temples, with a prominent chin, and more of the serpent than the dove in his sinister grey eye, there sat Mr. Snaggs with his truculent smile, and an affectation of sympathy on his tongue.

'Beware, sir, of what you say,' my mother was exclaiming, 'for ours is an honoured line--an ancient house.'

'So I perceive,' said Snaggs, impertinently, as he fixed his eyes on a very palpable hole in the ceiling; 'ah, the old story--the old story, Mrs. Mac Innon! Bad times and no price for sheep, eh? I would beg to remind you, my dear madam, that a certain pious writer says, "However unfortunate we may deem ourselves, yet let us remember there is an eye watching over us; it is a heavenly will, not a blind fate, that guides the world;" ah me--ah me!'

Fire and pride were flashing in my mother's dark grey eyes as I entered; then she burst into tears, and throwing down her work, exclaimed to me in Gaelic, and with all the spirit of the olden time--

'My son, God has sent you here in a lucky hour! I have come of a race that have smiled often in the face of death--why then, do I weep before this wretched worm?'

'What have you dared to say, Mr. Snaggs?' I asked, turning sharply to that personage; 'why do I find my mother in tears?'

'Because she is out of cash,' was the cool reply; 'a simple reason, my dear sir, and a plain one; but it is very little that _you_ do to furnish her with any. I have called for the last time anent the arrears of rent due to Sir Horace Everingham--the new proprietor of this estate--arrears due before he acquired the lands, and I receive still the same unvaried excuses, about sheep with the rot, cattle with the murrain, or scraps of traditions and antediluvian nonsense, about the time when Loch Ora belonged to the Mac Innons--and about your great-grandfather who fought at Culloden, and was nearly hanged at Carlisle, as, I think, he deserved to be, for opposing the House of Hanover, and the Kirk as established by law. Now the law, of which I am an unworthy representative--_the law says_, young man, that when a tenant--but I need not quote the cases before the Lords of Council and Session in 1792 or 1756 on this point, to _you_. If an instalment at least, of the aforesaid arrears--say about fifty pounds--is not paid to me--to _me_, sir,' he continued, laying a fat finger impressively into the palm of his left hand, 'then a notice of eviction shall be duly served upon you, with the rest of the lazy wretches in Glen Ora, who must all sail for Canada this summer, sure as my name is Ephraim Snaggs. Moreover, sir, I may inform you, that Sir Horace, by my recommendation--mine, sir--has some intentions of pulling down this absurd-looking old house, and erecting here a box for his friend, Captain Clavering, or for Mr. Snobleigh, of Snobleigh Park, I know not which; and if so, the law must be put in force against you, sir--the law of expulsion--you hear me!'

The reader may imagine the pride, wrath, and bitterness that swelled up within me, at this insolent speech, which had gradually approached the bullying point. I made a stride towards Snaggs, and my fingers twitched with an irresistible desire to grasp his throat.

My mother (poor old woman!) had long been in ill health. Mhari Mac Innon the 'wise woman' of our locality, and other aged people of the glen, alleged her illness was caused by her declining to drink of St. Colme's well, a famous medicinal spring in Glen Ora, where, for ages, the Mac Innons and adjacent tribes had been wont to quaff the water at midnight, as a sovereign remedy for all diseases; and thereafter drop in a coin, or tie a rag to the alders which overshadowed it, as an offering to the guardian spirit of the fountain. Pale, sad, and sickly, my mother sat in her high-backed chair, motionless and silent as if overwhelmed by the approaching tide of ruin, in the form of debt which we had not a shilling to meet--and of avarice which we could not satisfy.

'Mr. Snaggs,' said I, 'you should have reserved your detestable communications for my ears alone, and thus spared my poor mother the humiliation of a moment so bitter as this. She is old, and her thoughts and ideas have come down to her from other times. She cannot see, nor believe, that any man has authority to turn her off the land of the Mac Innons--'

'Pooh, my dear sir,' said Snaggs, waving his hand, and rising; 'if you are about to begin your old-world nonsense and twaddle about Celtic right in the soil, I must leave you. The sheriff's warrants will tell another story next week, if fifty pounds at least--'

'Listen to me, Ephraim Snaggs,' said I, forcing him into a seat, and grasping his shoulder like a vice. 'I am here on the land that belonged to my forefathers--to Angus Mac Innon, who fought for King James at Culloden--'

'Ha-ha--stuff--there you go again!'

'There was a time,' I continued, fiercely, 'when had you, or such as you, spoken above your breath in Glen Ora, you had been flung into the loch with a hundred weight of stone at your neck. There was a time when the Mac Innons owned all the land we may see from Ben Ora; when we had Griban in Mull, the Isles of Tiree, of Pabay, and Scalpa, with Strathardle in Skye. Poor as we are now, we owned all that, but only in common--mark me, sir, _in common_, with the people of our name. Listen to me, Mr. Snaggs,' I continued, as the fierce sob of pride, so difficult to repress, rose to my throat; 'I am the last of a long line, whose misfortune it has been to fight for the losing side. Our people marched to Worcester under Lachlan M'hor, and perished there in heaps; we were at Sheriffmuir, under the banner of the Marquis of Seaforth, for a marquis he was, by order of the king; we were "out" in the '45, under Angus Mac Innon, and of all the swordsmen he marched from yonder glen, which you are about to depopulate, not a man came back from Culloden--as God hears me--not one. Since then our people have gone forth in the Highland regiments to every part of the world. Some have left their bones on the heights of Abraham and in the isles of the Western Indies; some sleep under the shadow of the Pyramids and on the plains of the Peninsula. In India, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, wherever Britain wanted men to fight her battles, there have they been faithful and true, loyal and brave, standing foremost in the ranks of war, and giving place to none! All my own family have perished in the service of their country since this century began--I am the last of them, and as their reward, our roof is to be torn from us, and we are to be expelled from the home and the graves of our kindred--we, the descendants of the old aboriginal race, who first trod the land after God separated it from the waters, and why? because a miserable fifty pounds may not be forthcoming by a certain day! There was a time, Mr. Ephraim Snaggs, when the cry of _Bas Alpin_ from yonder rock would easily have brought six hundred swordsmen to guard the roof you threaten; and he whom you beard--he, who from the first Mac Innon, has come through twenty generations in the right line.'

'Had you come through twenty generations in the _wrong_ line I would have respected you quite as much, sir,' said Mr. Snaggs, with his bland professional sneer, as he rose again, and smoothed the nap of his hat, preparatory to retiring, as if wearied by the torrent of Gaelic I had poured upon him. 'All these fine arguments about broadswords and barbarism won't pay the rent or satisfy the just claims of Sir Horace, thus the law of landlord and tenant must take its course. You have no means of raising money, I suppose?'

'None!'

'No friends--eh?'

'None.'

'Nothing you can sell?'

'Nothing!'

'Then, take my advice, and quietly quit the glen altogether; there are plenty of counting-rooms, offices, and shops in the Lowlands, where such great sturdy fellows as you may easily make yearly, triple the rent of this old tumble-down place, with its patch of potatoes and corn. Quit your gun and fishing-rod--betake yourself to some honest and industrious occupation, instead of indulging in the very sophistry of vanity, and in wandering about these hills the livelong day, sighing over an imaginary past and an impossible future. No man has any right in the soil but such as the law gives him. Why, Mr. Allan, before I was half your age, I was one of the smartest writer's clerks in Glasgow, earning my threepence a page of a hundred and twenty-five words; but perhaps you would prefer a shopman's place--'

The shout with which Rob Roy greeted honest Bailie Jarvie's proposal to take his two sons as apprentices, was nothing to the shrill cry of anger with which my mother interrupted the sneer I was too poor to resent with pride--besides in its soundness, the advice of Snaggs humbled, while it exasperated me.

'I would rather see my boy Allan buried in his grave at the Stones of St. Colme than truckling to a Lowland dog like you, Ephraim Snaggs! Begone, lest I smite you on the face, weak though my hand, for recommending a calling so vile to Mac Innon of Glen Ora!'

'Mother, mother!' I exclaimed, 'what can I do?'

'Shoulder a musket and march to fight the Russians, if God opens up no brighter or better path to the son of a line that led their hundreds to battle in the times of old!' was the fierce and Spartan response.

'Very well, ma'am--very well,' continued the matter-of-fact Snaggs, smoothing the nap of his beaver, and smiling with his ticket-of-leave look. '"The gentle mind," saith the divine Blair, "is like the smooth stream, which reflects every object in its just proportion and in its fairest colours;" but these outbursts of anger, in the style of Helen Mac Gregor or Lady Macbeth, won't satisfy Sir Horace Everingham; and if the sum of fifty pounds, at least, be not forthcoming----'

A tremendous knocking at the outer door, and the sound of voices in great agitation, arrested the factor's angry farewell. Minnie grew pale, and hurried to open, and hastening into the passage, I met two of the Englishmen and the ladies, with disorder apparent in their attire and alarm in their faces. The oldest of their party, Sir Horace, was absent; and now the danger of the mountain, and the warnings withheld by Callum Dhu, rushed reproachfully on my memory.

'My father, Mr. Mac Innon--my father, Mr. Snaggs!' exclaimed Miss Everingham, rushing towards us, with clasped hands. 'I seek succour for my father!' she continued, trembling, agitated, pale, and in tears, and with hair and dress disordered.

'How--your father--Sir Horace?'

'We missed him at the rock, Mr. Snaggs, on Ben Ora--the steep rock, I know not how you name it!'

'The Craig-na-tuirc,' said I.

'Yes--thank you--yes; and he did not come back to us.'

'Some dreadful event must have occurred,' added her dark-eyed companion, Miss Clavering, whose usual bloom was blanched and gone; 'so many accidents--'

'Get us some aid, my good man,' said her brother, a tall and soldier-like fellow, with a heavy black moustache and a dragoon air; 'ropes, poles, and a couple of stable-lanterns, if you have such things. We must make a search after the old gentleman--come Snobleigh, my boy, look sharp!'

'Oh-aw-yaas,' drawled his companion, who had a very used-up air, and wore a short-tailed tartan shooting-jacket, an eye-glass, a cigar in his mouth, and a faint moustache under his snub nose; 'young fellow, eh-aw-aw, what is your name?'

'Glen Ora,' said my mother, interrupting me, and half springing from her chair, irate at his nonchalance.

'Aw--odd--very, Mr. Glen Ora; you'll look aftaw the ladies, whom we shall leave here in your chawge.'

'I am master here, at least,' said I, haughtily; 'Snaggs, hand chairs--see to the ladies, while I go to the Craig-na-tuirc, to search for Sir Horace.'

'Oh thank you--bless you!' exclaimed Miss Everingham, grasping my arm; 'all my trust is in you, Allan.'

'Lanterns--eh, aw-aw, you'll require--'

'The moon is up, and we require no other light,' said I, cutting short this mouthing drawler; 'come, Callum Mac Ian,' I added, as that personage, whose solitary hut the alarm had reached, appeared among us; 'old Sir Horace has fallen over the Craig-na-tuirc, or lost his way on the hills--let us seek him.'

Though weak and tottering, my mother had propped herself upon her cane, and risen to her full height, which was tall and commanding, to welcome those agitated and unceremonious visitors.

'Mr. Snaggs,' said she, pointing to the door, with the air of a Siddons, 'you may retire.'

Snaggs bowed with a malevolent smile, and withdrew.

'Ladies, be seated--gentlemen, assist the ladies to seats--thank you; be composed, Miss Everingham, and be assured that we will leave nothing undone to discover your father, who must have lost his way on the mountains. They were not made for Lowland legs to climb,' she added, with a cold smile.

Her stature, her lofty air, and calm decisive manner, awed the two English girls, and calmed their excessive agitation, while it dashed the somewhat brusque air of the gentlemen; and, reseating herself in her wide, old-fashioned chair, she spread her skirt all over it, in a way peculiar to ladies of 'the old school,' and then fixed her keen grey Highland eyes upon her unexpected and not over-welcome visitors, to learn the cause of all this commotion and alarm for one towards whom it may easily be supposed she felt but little love, as she deemed poor Sir Horace little better than a usurper, and was wont to stigmatize him roughly in Gaelic as 'a Hanoverian rat.'

I snatched a hunting-horn, Callum threw off his plaid, and leaving the two perfumed gentlemen to follow us as they best could in their well-glazed boots and tightly-strapped pantaloons, we took our way with all speed towards the rocky summit of Ben Ora.