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"If Tearlach ban og, as they used to call him, were alive now," said he and indeed there was never any Stuart of them all, not even the Fair Young Charles himself, who looked more handsome than this same Macleod of Dare who now stood before her "you would get him more men to follow him than any flag or standard he ever raised." She cast her eyes down. Mrs. Ross's guests began to leave.
"I must go," said I a second time. "Another one game," cried John Splendid. He had been winning every bout, but with a reluctance that shone honestly on his face, and I knew it was to give Tearlach and me a chance to better our reputation that he would have us hang on. "You have hard luck indeed," he would say.
The overturned age was not to be rescued by charms and virtues which the age itself was to ruin and destroy. Loyal memories are faithful, not to what the Prince became under stress of exile, and treachery, and hope deferred, and death in life, de vivre et de pas vivre but to what he once was, Tearlach Righ nan Gael. Of one character in this woful tale a word may be said.
He put round his rapier more on the groin, and gave a jerk at the narrow belt creasing his fair-day crimson vest For me I had only the dirk to speak of, for the sgian dubh at my leg was a silver toy, and Tearlach, being a burgh man, had no arm at all. He lay hold on an oaken shinty stick that hung on the wall, property of the ferry-house landlord's son.
As I went clattering slowly by, I would say at one house front, "Yonder's my old comrade, Tearlach, who taught me my one tune on the pipe-chanter; is his beard grown yet, I wonder?" At another, "There is the garret window of the schoolmaster's daughter does she sing so sweetly nowadays in the old kirk?"
The commoners in the late troubles have been leal enough, I'll give them that credit, but some of the gentry wag their tongues for Prince Tearlach and ply their pens for Geordie's pay." The servant came in with two candles, placed them on the table, and renewed the fire. He had on a great woollen night-cowl of gaudy hue with a superb tassel that bobbed grotesquely over his beady eyes.
"Is it not as I said? yonder's your MacNicolls for you." In a flash I thought of Mistress Betty with her hair down, roused by the marauding crew, and I ran hurriedly down the street shouting the burgh's slogan, "Slochd!" "Damn the man's hurry!" said John Splendid, trotting at my heels, and with Tearlach too he gave lungs to the shout. "Slochd!"
I spent most of the day with John Splendid and one Tearlach Fraser, on old comrade, and as luck, good or ill, would have it, the small hours of morning were on me before I thought of going home. Earlier in the day, by a galley or wherry, the MacLachlans also had left, but not the young laird, who put up for the night at the house of Provost Brown.
The clans came in, and as Charles marched southeast, each glen sent down its warriors to join the stream. The clansmen, as a rule, had probably little knowledge of or interest in the cause. They followed their chiefs. The surviving Gaelic poetry speaks much of the chieftains; of Tearlach, righ nan Gael, but little is said.
M'Iver took on a set stern jaw, and looked his chief very dourly in the face. "My Lord of Argile," he said, "you're my cousin-ger-man, and you're in a despondent key, and small blame to you with your lands smoking about you from Cruachan to Kilmartin; but if you were King Tearlach himself, I would take no insult from you. Do you charge me with any of your misfortunes?"
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