Legends of the Black Watch; or, Forty-second HighlandersGrant, James
History
Legends of the Black Watch; or, Forty-second Highlanders
Grant, James
Great Britain. Army. Regiment of Foot, 42nd -- History -- Anecdotes
Each scarcely knew how deep was the love of the other; for the Scots
are not a demonstrative people, and the most powerful emotions of the
heart are those which they have been taught, perhaps erroneously, to
conceal; but of this negative quality we find less in the more
impulsive Celt. The ardour of love had now been succeeded by the
affection of marriage, and the sincerity of friendship had replaced
the glow of passion; but Roderick's enthusiasm in the estimate of
perfect excellence by which he judged his own little wife was only
equalled by the standard which she had formed for him. To make her
happy was to be himself happy, and it was the study of his life to
surround her with such comforts as a camp and barrack or transport
afforded upon the pay of a lieutenant of the line in the days of
George II. "England," says honest Harry _Coverdale_, "expects every
man to do his duty, and occasionally recompenses him for it with
honourable starvation." And such was indeed a subaltern's pay in
1757.
In their new mode of existence all seclusion was destroyed; and amid
the whirl of a military life, the hurry of embarkation for foreign
service, and in the narrow recess allotted to her in the transport,
odious by the odour of tar, tobacco, and bilge water, poor Mary
sighed for the hum of the summer bee, and for the free, pure breeze
that waved the heather bells in Glencoe, or for her husband's once
happy home in Glenarrow, roofless and ruined now, as the flames and
the devastators of the ducal butcher had left it.
"We have lost all, Mary," said Roderick, bitterly, as one evening she
sat on deck, nestled in his plaid, and whispering of these things and
of other times; "all but the name of our fathers have gone to the
Campbells of Breadalbane, for they have become the lords of all."
"But a time shall come, Roderick, when these usurpations and another
still greater shall end, and then the Clan Donald, the MacGregors,
the MacIntyres of Glen O, and the race of MacVicar, like the King,
shall enjoy their own again."
"Mhari, laoghe mo chri--Mary, calf of my heart," replied the husband,
folding her, with a smile, to his breast; "but this will never be----"
"Until the _fatal plaid_ floats down Loch Fyne," she added, with a
smile.
There is a Highland prophecy, that a time is coming when a plaid of
many colours shall float down Loch Fyne from the Ara to the Firth of
Clyde, and then the eagles from a thousand hills shall assemble, and
each take therefrom a piece of his own colour; and this is to be the
day of general restoration by the Campbells of all of which they have
dispossessed the clans of the west.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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