Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell

Grandmother, she had made a miraculous recovery, her lips very red, her nose very white, and her hair done in an elaborate style. She wore a black velvet dress of more discreet cut than of the night before, for Scotsmen are priggish and even those laymen who indulge in immorality do it as modestly as possible. Grandmother said, “Ah, Faether MacBurne, and ye’ll not be disappointing us?”
     
    Father MacBurne was long and lean, with the red, prominent face of the Scot, the curved Semitic nose of the true Celt, and the Celt’s fierce eyes. But his hair was very white though thick, and his hands were slightly gnarled. “Very weel, Rose Mary,” he said, “but it’s nae a sad story like the others.”
     

Father MacBurne and the Doughty Chieftain
     
    “When I was a bairn,” said the priest, “the Scots in the Highlands, the Orkney Islands and the Outer and Inner Hebrides ignored England still, or if forced to acknowledge her existence they did it with bloody dispatch. They wanted nothing to do with the Sassenach, his Parliament, his monarch, his tax-gatherers and his religion. Their fief was still to their vanished kings, and chieftains and clans, and it was a company of valiant Englishmen, indeed, who braved those men in the shadow of their dark hills and before their darker faces. The mace and the dirk were still called into active use, and many an unwary Sassenach was buried in some wild glen together with his tax-papers or his warrants.”
     
    The clans, still powerful, had their own laws, which were administered rigidly by local chieftains. It was unusual for any Scotsmen, in those remote places, to resort to city magistrates, except for high crimes calling for ropes or long prison terms or suchlike. But if a man merely fought with his neighbor, as always, he sought out his own chieftain and laid the matter before him. However, if the case concerned murder — and it often did — then sometimes, but only sometimes, it was referred to the city magistrates for disposal via the hangman’s rope. It was a terrible thing to be consigned to those granite cities, with the granite statues guarding every intersection, and with a granite sky arched overhead like frozen stone. Your Highlander hated those cities, for he was usually Catholic, and the cities had the odor of Calvin and Knox, and there was no cross permitted on a steeple, not even a Catholic one. And the Scotsman had his own Parliament, as he has today.
     
    Occasionally London was shocked by some unusual amount of blood being shed ‘up there, among the ruddy Scots’, and made inquiries about the matter. But on the whole London preferred to have no part in those affairs. It could be dangerous. And what were a few score Scotsmen more or less? Let well enough alone, said London, wisely, remembering the border raids not so far back in history, and burning hamlets and the mad scream of bagpipes in the black crannies of the hills. London only asked, reasonably, that taxes be paid, and did not press the point too much if returns were languid. The tax-gatherer had learned not to look too closely in hedges where boxes of gold sovereigns might be hidden. He took the man’s word for what he ‘owed’. If it seemed somewhat small, in view of the large herds of sheep and the rich meadows and the size of the house, compromise, as always, was the better part of taxation.
     
    The Highlander despised the meek townsman with his books and his bank statements and his eagerness to be legal. Where was the rascal’s spirit, then? Where was his blood, his pride? Where was the passion of his soul, the remembrance of his ancestors? All had died in the granite cities. All had died, with liberty. Aye, and he paraded in his larcenous kilts, in the streets, on the holidays, looking brave then, with the bagpipes skirling and his legs stumping, but he was a weak fox for all that, he with the white town-face and the womanish eyes. He was no true son of Scotland. Be damned to