Rose-red for the banner of love,
And a blush for the cheek of the bride;
To the valleys and hills of fair Loch Fyne
The word went far and wide:
They will marry this day, and marry to death,
Our flower of ladies, Elizabeth.
On through the valleys and down from the hills,
As the gathering cry of the clan
Had called them forth, through the moithering mist
The lieges rode or ran
To meet at the foot of the runic cross,
And wring out the heart of their wrong and loss.
And there met them here and there on the breeze,
Faint as a word of shame,
The sound of a bell, but they knew not well,
As dubiously it came,
Or whether it chimed, or whether it tolled,
But they thought a knell had been more bold.
And they questioned the wind as it rose and fell
Above and about Loch Fyne—
The wind that lashed at the shrinking wave,
And harried the grove of pine—
Is your cry as the cry of her love on the rack,
Or only our lady's coronach?
But when they had come to the cross, and thence
Peered over the castle wall,
And beheld the rout that was thronging the court,
And the train that swarmed out of the hall—
With the banners that flaunted beside the door,
And the dog and the ship that the banners bore—
And saw by the fiery beard and eyes,
And the motions cold and dull,
That the man who was leading the bartered bride
Was Maclean of Duart in Mull,—
Then they knew they had married to worse than death
Their flower of ladies, Elizabeth.
Rose-red is the banner of love,
But this bride is pale, snow-pale,
And she grows snow-cold as he helps her to horse,
As the touch of the groom were bale;
But she proudly follows the lead of fate,
Nor once looks back when she passes the gate.
Some tuneless souls will meet, and make
No answering music here,
But keep in our low, reverberate air,
The peace of the outer sphere,
And passing, mix with the silent dead
And leave the word of our life unsaid.
But not Glenara's falls at 'spate,'
With their lusty voice for praise,
And not the vocal heart of spring
That beats in its covert ways—
Not stream, or merle, or 'plaining dove
Went ever so near to utter love
As twain who under the 'marriage-tree'
Once heard their voices all,
And sent a confluent answer back
To the cuckoo's double call,—
A sudden note so piercing sweet,
It drowned the waterfall,—
Till with the primrose she grew pale,
He, wakeful with the nightingale.
For all as wise as their hearts had been
To know and to claim their own,
They saw how oft by the felon world
Love's dues are overthrown:
The world that knows not thine or mine,
But snatches a treasure from off a shrine.
And so it fell that the deep Argyle
Had a bargain he would make,
And his sister must be the seal of it,
Should it burn her heart or break.
Thus he married her to the slow, the dull,
Red-bearded tyrant, the chief of Mull.
The clansmen saw her where she came
In the hold of the red Maclean,
Who once had ridden more free than free
With love at her bridle-rein,
And passing left them for lingering trace
The smile that had flowered on every face.
They let her go with never a word—
Was never a word to say;
MacCallum Môr was lord of all,
And his will must have its way;
Though the heart of the speechless bride was wrath
As the torrent roaring beside her path.
But when to Cladich ferry they came,
And the chief had called a halt,
While his shaggy train on bite and sup
Were making swift assault,
She lighted down, and knelt beside
An image of the Crucified.
There, overborne with the stroke of fate,
As droopingly she sunk,
She had not known how near her heart
There knelt a cowlèd monk,
Till he took her hand and whispered low,
And she felt it riven with joy and woe.
Here was the voice in all the world,
For her the only voice—
The hand whose touch in face of death
Had made her sense rejoice;
And for these hearts with love so rife,
One moment but of common life!
'Up, love, and fly!' For one heart-beat
Love had and held his own:
They mingled breath, they mingled tears—
A word and he had flown,
Had carried her over ford and dyke
From Campbells and Macleans alike.
She strove with him, she clasped the cross:
'Let pine,' she said, 'or die,
But never from this fore-front of fate
Tempt me to fail or fly;
It has not been laid upon any man,
But on me to suffer and save the clan.
'MacCallum Môr has spared to meet
Maclean as in open fight,
So awake or asleep in his island keep
I must face him day or night;
For a true Argyle is but one thing sure:
The will and the word of MacCallum Môr.'
They looked to right, they looked to left:
O fair and cruel world!
Where tender firstlings of the spring
On gusts of March are hurled,
The wild wind bent the pine-tops tall,
It rent the folded leaves, and small;—
The mocking sun laughed down on all.
They looked to left, they looked to right,
And lo, through the cloven mist,
Loch Awe, that laughed to the laughing sun,
As stormily they kissed.
'Cold sun,' she said, 'and bitter bliss,
Dear love, be witness: never kiss
Of man shall mar the print of this!'
A heavy freight bore down that day
The Cladich ferry-boat,
And one that saw it had leifer seen
It founder, I think, than float.
'Better a bride so foully wed
Were bedded here in the lake,' he said.
But the lake would none of them, bride or groom,
Or scurvy train, and tossed,
'Twixt Cladich ferry and Brander Pass,
The boat that crossed and crossed;
And the eyes that hung on the throat of the pass
Saw, blocking the way of love, the mass
Of dark Ben Cruachan, or ere they turned
In wrath from the path of men;
And the way-worn bride, by forest and flood,
Through moss and reedy fen,
Went, forced on her way in the teeth of the wind
By the men of Mull who were trooping behind.
They cross the Sound; the dim isle seems
Adrift in the wind and rain,
As cold in the shadow of Castle Duart
Its sodden shore they gain,
But the iron click of the stanchioned gate
Rings home like the closing jaws of Fate.
Her bower-maidens had busked the bride,
The feast was long and loud,
But she scarce had sat at the board more still
Had she sat there in her shroud.
And her courage failing for wearihead:
''Tis a far cry to Loch Awe,' she said.