On some days I kept to Glen Shim as the tod keeps to the cairn when heather burns, afraid almost to let even my thoughts wander there lest they should fly back distressed, to say the hope I cherished was in vain. I worked in the wood among Use pines that now make rooftrees for my home, and at nights I went on ttilidh among some of the poorer houses of the Glen, and found a drug for a mind uneasy in the talcs our peasants told around the fire. A drug, and yet a drug sometimes with the very disease in itself I sought for it to kill. For the love of a man for a maid is the one story of all lands, of all ages, trick it as we may, and my good people, telling their old ancient histories round the lire, found, although they never knew it, a young man’s quivering heart a score of times a night.
Still at times, by day and night—ay! in the very midmost watches of the stars-I walked, in my musing, as I thought, upon the causeyed street, where perhaps I had been sooner in the actual fact if M’Iver’s departure had not been delayed. He was swaggering, they told me, about the town in his old regimentals, every pomp of the foreign soldier assumed again as if they had never been relaxed in all those yean of peace and commerce. I drank stoutly in the taverns, and ‘twas constantly, “Landlady, I’m the lawing,” for the fishermen, that they might love him. A tale went round, too, that one morning he went to a burial in Kilmalieu, and Argile was there seeing the last of an old retainer to his long home, and old Macnachtan came riding down past corpse and mourner with his only reverence a finger to his cap. “Come down off your horse when death or Argile goes bye,” cried M’Iver, hauling the laird off his saddle. But between Argile and him were no transactions; the pride of both would not allow it, though it was well known that their affections were stronger than ever they had been before, and that Gordon made more than one attempt at a plan to bring them together.
It is likely, too, I had been down—leaving M’Iver out of consideration altogether—had there not been the tales about MacLachlan, tales that came to my ears in the most miraculous way, with no ill intention on the part of the gossips—about his constant haunting of Inneraora and the company of his cousin. He had been seen there with her on the road to Carlunnan. That venue of all others! God! did the river sing for him too among its reeds and shallows; did the sun tip Dunchuach like a thimble and the wild beast dally on the way? That was the greatest blow of all! It left plain (I thought in ray foolishness) the lady’s coolness when last I met her; for rae henceforth (so said bitterness) the serious affairs of life, that in her notion set me more than courtship. I grew solemn, so gloomy in spirit that even my father observed the ceasing of my whistle and song, and the less readiness of my smile. And he, poor man, thought it the melancholy of Inverlochy and the influence of this ruined countryside.
When I went down to the town again the very house-fronts seemed inhospitable, so that I must pass the time upon the quay. There are days at that season when Loch Finne, so calm, so crystal, so duplicate of the sky, seems like water sunk and lost for ever to wind and wave, when the sea-birds doze upon its kindly bosom like bees upon the flower, and a silence hangs that only breaks in distant innuendo of the rivers or the low of cattle on the Cowal shore. The great bays lapse into hills that float upon a purple haze, forest nor lea has any sign of spring’s extravagance or the flame of the autumn that fires Dunchuach till it blazes like a torch. All is in the light sleep of the year’s morning, and what, I have thought, if God in His pious whim should never awake it any more?
It was such a day when I went up and down the rough cobble of the quay, and to behold men working there at their noisy and secular occupations seemed, at first, a Sabbath desecration. But even they seemed affected by this marvellous peace of sea and sky, as they lifted from the net or rested on the tackle to look across greasy gunnels with some vague unquiet of the spirit at the marvellous restfulness of the world. Their very voices learned a softer note from that lulled hour of the enchanted season, and the faint blue smoke of their den fires rose and mingled in the clustered masts or nestled wooing in the drying sails. Then a man in drink came roaring down the quay, an outrage on the scene, and the magic of the day was gone! The boats bobbed and nudged each other or strained at the twanging cord as seamen and fishers spanged from deck to deck; rose cries in loud and southward Gaelic or the lowlands of Air. The world was no longer dreaming but stark awake, all but the sea and the lapsing bays and the brown floating hills. Town Inneraora bustled to its marge. Here was merchandise, here the pack and the bale; snuffy men in perukes, knee-breeched and portly, came and piped in high English, managing the transport of their munitions ashore.
I was standing in the midst of the throng of the quay-head, with my troubled mind rinding ease in the industry and interest of those people without loves or jealousies, and only their poor merchandise to exercise them, when I started at the sound of a foot coming up the stone slip from the wateredge. I turned, and who was there but MacLachlan? He was all alone but for a haunch-man, a gillie-wet-foot as we call him, and he had been set on the slip by a wherry that had approached from Cowal side unnoticed by me as I stood in meditation. As he came up the sloping way, picking his footsteps upon the slimy stones, he gave no heed to the identity of the person before him; and with my mood in no way favourable to polite discourse with the fellow, I gave a pace or two round the elbow of the quay, letting him pass on his way up among the clanking rings and chains of the moored gaberts, the bales of the luggers, and the brawny and crying mariners. He was not a favourite among the quay-folk, this pompous little gentleman, with his nose in the air and his clothing so very gaudy. The Lowlands men might salute his gentility if they cared; no residenters of the place did so, but turned their shoulders on him and were very busy with their affairs as he passed. He went bye with a waff of wind in his plaiding, and his haunch-man as he passed at a discreet distance got the double share of jibe and glunch from the mariners.
At first I thought of going home; a dread came on me that if I waited longer in the town I might come upon this intruder and his cousin, when it would sore discomfort me to do so. Thus I went slowly up the quay, and what I heard in the bye-going put a new thought in my head.
Two or three seamen were talking together as I passed, with nudges and winks and sly laughs, not natives of the place but from farther up the loch, yet old frequenters with every chance to know the full ins and outs of what they discoursed upon. I heard but three sentences as I passed; they revealed that MacLachlan at Kilmichael market had once bragged of an amour in Inneraora. That was all! But it was enough to set every drop of blood in my body boiling. I had given the dog credit for a decent affection, and here he was narrating a filthy and impossible story. Liar! liar! liar! At first the word rose to my mouth, and I had to choke it at my teeth for fear it should reveal my passion to the people as I passed through among them with a face inflamed; then doubt arose, a contention of recollections, numb fears—but the girl’s eyes triumphed: I swore to myself she at least should never know the villany of this vulgar and lying rumour set about the country by a rogue.
Now all fear of facing the street deserted me. I felt a man upright, imbued with a strong sense of justice; I felt I must seek out John Splendid and get his mind, of all others, upon a villany he eould teach me to avenge. I found him at Aakaig’s comer, a flushed man with perhaps (as I thought at first) too much spirits in him to be the most sensible of advisers in a matter of such delicacy.
“Elrigmore!” he cried; “sir, I give you welcome to Inneraora! You will not know the place, it has grown so much since you last visited its humble street.”
“I’m glad to see you now, John,” I said, hurriedly. “I would sooner see you than any other living person here.”
He held up a finger and eyed me pawkily. “Come, man, cornel” he said, laughing, “On your oath now, is there not a lady? And that minds me; you have no more knowledge of the creatures, no more pluck in their presence, than a child. Heavens, what a soldier of fortune is this? Seven years among the army; town to town, camp to camp, here to-day and away to-morrow, with a soldier’s pass to love upon your back and haunch, and yet you have not learned to lift the sneck of a door, but must be tap-tapping with your finger-nails.”
“I do not know what you mean,” said I.
“Lorf! lord!” he cried, pretending amazement, “and here’s schooling! Just think it over for yourself. You are not an ill-looking fellow (though I think I swing a kilt better myself), you are the proper age (though it’s wonderful what a youngish-looking man of not much over forty may do), you have a name for sobriety, and Elrigmore carries a good many head of cattle and commands a hundred swords,—would a girl with any wisdom and no other sweetheart in her mind turn her back on such a list of virtues and graces? If I had your reputation and your estate, I could have the pick of the finest women in Argile—ay, and far beyond it.”
“Never mind about that just now,” I demanded, gripping my preacher by the hand and forcing him with me out of the way of the passers-by, whose glance upon us would have seemed an indelicacy when we were discussing so precious a thing as my lady’s honour.
“But I shall mind it,” insisted M’Iver, pursing his lips as much to check a hiccough as to express his determination. “It seems I am the only man dare take the liberty. Fie on ye! man, fie! you have not once gone to see the Provost or his daughter since I saw you last I dare not go myself for the sake of a very stupid blunder; but I met the old man coming up the way an hour ago, and he was asking what ailed you at them. Will I tell you something, Colin? The Provost’s a gleg man, but he’s not so gleg as his wife. The dame for me! say I, in every household, if it’s her daughter’s love-affairs she’s to keep an eye on.”
“You know so much of the lady and her people,” said I, almost losing patience, “that it’s a wonder you never sought her for yourself.”
He laughed. “Do you think so?” he said. “I have no doubt of the result; at least I would have had no doubt of it a week or two ago, if I had taken advantage of my chances.” Then he laughed anew. “I said the good-wife was gleg; I’m just as gleg myself.”
This tipsy nonsense began to annoy me; but it was useless to try to check it, for every sentence uttered seemed a spark to his vanity.
“It’s about Betty I want to speak,” I said.
“And it’s very likely too; I would not need to be very gleg to see that She does not want to speak to me, however, or of me, as you’ll find out when once you see her. I am in her black books sure enough, for I saw her turn on the street not an hour ago to avoid me.”
“She’ll not do that to MacLachlan,” I put in, glad of the opening, “unless she hears—and God forbid it—that the scamp lightlies her name at common fairs.”
M’Iver drew himself up, stopped, and seemed to sober.
“What’s this you’re telling me?” he asked, and I went over the incident on the quay. It was enough. It left him as hot as myself. He fingered at his coat-buttons and his cuffs, fastening and unfastening them; he played nervously with the hilt of his dirk; up would go his brows and down again like a bird upon his prey; his lips would tighten on his teeth, and all the time he was muttering in his pick of languages sentiments natural to the occasion. Gaelic is the poorest of tongues to swear in: it has only a hash of borrowed terms from Lowland Scots; but my cavalier was well able to make up the deficiency.
“Quite so; very true and very comforting,” I said at last; “but what’s to be done?”
“What’s to be done?” said he, with a start “Surely to God there’s no doubt about that!”
“No, sir; I hope you know me better. But how’s it to be done? I thought of going up in front of the whole quay and making him chew his lie at the point of my dagger. Then I thought more formality was needed—a friend or two, a select venue, and careful leisure time for so important a meeting.”
“But what’s the issue upon which the rencontre shall take place?” asked M’Iver, it seemed to me with ridiculous scrupulosity.
“Why need you ask?” said I. “You do not expect me to invite him to repeat the insult or exaggerate the same.”
M’Iver turned on me almost roughly and shook me by the shoulder. “Man!” said he, “wake up, and do not let your wits hide in the heels of your boots. Are you clown enough to think of sending a lady’s name around the country tacked on to a sculduddry tale like this? You must make the issue somewhat more politic than that.”
“I agree with you,” I confessed; “it was stupid of me not to think of it, but what can I do? I have no other quarrel with the man.”
“Make one, then,” said M’Iver. “I cannot comprehend where you learned your trade as cavalier, or what sort of company you kept in Mackay’s, if you did not pick up and practise the art of forcing a quarrel with a man on any issue you cared to choose. In ten minutes I could make this young fellow put down his gage in a dispute about the lacing of boots.”
“But in that way at least I’m the poorest of soldiers; I never picked a quarrel, and yet here’s one that sets my gorge to my palate, but cannot be fought on.”
“Tuts, tuts! man,” he cried, “it seems that, after all, you must leave the opening of this little play to John M’Iver. Come with me a bit yont the Cross here and take a lesson.”
He led me up the wide pend close and round the back of old Stonefield’s dwelling, and into a corner of a lane that gave upon the fields, yet at the same time kept a plain view of the door of Askaig’s house, where we guessed MacLachlan was now on his visit to the Provost’s family.
“Let us stand here,” said he, “and I’ll swear I’m not very well acquainted with our friend’s habits if he’s not passing this way to Carlunnan sometime in the next ten minutes, for I saw Mistress Betty going up there, as I said, not so very long ago.”
This hint at MacLachlan’s persistency exasperated me the more. I felt that to have him by the throat would be a joy second only to one other in the world.
M’Iver saw my passion—it was ill to miss seeing it—and seemed struck for the first time by the import of what we were engaged upon.
“We were not given to consider the end of a duello from the opening when abroad,” he said; “but that was because we were abroad, and had no remonstrance and reminder in the face of familiar fields and houses and trees, and the passing footsteps of our own people. Here, however, the end’s to be considered from the beginning—have you weighed the risks in your mind?”
“I’ve weighed nothing,” said I, shortly, “except that I feel in me here I shall have his blood before nightfall.”
“He’s a fairly good hand with his weapon, they tell me.”
“If he was a wizard, with the sword of Great Donald, I would touch him to the vitals. Have I not learned a little, if you’ll give me the credit, from Alasdair Mor?”
“I forgot that,” said M’lver; “you’ll come through it all right And here’s our man coming up the lane. No anger now; nothing to be said on your side till I give you a sign, and then I can leave the rest to your wisdom.”
MacLachlan came staving up the cobbles in a great hurry, flailing the air, as he went, with a short rattan, for he affected some of the foppish customs the old officers brought back from the Continent. He was for passing us with no more than a jerk of the head, but M’Iver and I between us took up the mouth of the lane, and as John seemed to smile on him like one with gossip to exchange, he was bound to stop.
“Always on the going foot, MacLachlan,” said John, airily. “I never see a young gentleman of your age and mettle but I wish he could see the wisdom of putting both to the best purpose on the field.”
“With your cursed foreigners, I suppose you mean,” said the young fellow. “I could scarcely go as a private pikeman like yourself.”
“I daresay not, I daresay not,” answered M’Iver, pricked at his heart (I could tell by his eye) by this reflection upon his humble office, but keeping a marvellously cool front to his cockerel. “And now when I think of it, I am afraid you have neither the height nor width for even so ornamental a post as an ensign’s.”
MacLachlan restrained himself too, unwilling, no doubt, as I thought, to postpone his chase of the lady by so much time as a wrangle with John M’Iver would take up. He affected to laugh at Splendid’s rejoinder, turned the conversation upon the disjasket condition of the town, and edged round to get as polite a passage as possible between us, without betraying any haste to sever himself from our company. But both John Splendid and I had our knees pretty close together, and the very topic he started seemed to be the short cut to the quarrel we sought.
“A poor town indeed,” admitted M’Iver, readily, “but it might be worse. It can be built anew. There’s nothing in nature, from a pigsty to a name for valour and honour, that a wise man may not patch up somehow.”
MacLachlan’s retort to this opening was on the tip of his tongue; but his haste made him surrender a taunt as likely to cause trouble. “You’re very much in the proverb way to-day,” was all he said. “I’m sure I wish I saw Inneraora as hale and complete as ever it was: it never had a more honest friend than myself.”
“That one has missed,” thought I, standing by in a silent part of this three-cornered convention. M’Iver smiled mildly, half, I should think, at the manner in which his thrust had been foiled, half to keep MacLachlan still with us. His next attack was more adroit though roundabout, and it effected its purpose.
“I see you are on your way up to the camp,” said he, with an appearance of indifference. “We were just thinking of a daunder there ourselves.”
“No,” said MacLachlan, shortly; “I’m for farther up the Glen.”
“Then at least we’ll have your company part of the way,” said John, and the three of us walked slowly off, the young gentleman with no great warmth at the idea, which was likely to spoil his excursion to some degree. M’Iver took the place between us, and in the rear, twenty paces, came the gille cas-fleuch.
“I have been bargaining for a horse up here,” said John in a while, “and I’m anxious that Elrigmore should see it. You’ll have heard I’m off again on the old road.”
“There’s a rumour of it,” said MacLachlan, cogitating on his own affairs, or perhaps wondering what our new interest in his company was due to.
“Ah! it’s in my blood,” said John, “in my blood and bones! Argile was a fairly good master—so to call him—but—well, you understand yourself: a man of my kind at a time like this feels more comfortable anywhere else than in the neighbourhood of his chief.”
“I daresay,” replied MacLachlan, refusing the hook, and yet with a sneer in his accent.
“Have you heard that his lordship and I are at variance since our return from the North?”
“Oh! there’s plenty of gossip in the town,” said MacLachlan. “It’s common talk that you threw your dagger in his face. My father, who’s a small chief enough so far as wealth of men and acres goes, would have used the weapon to let out the hot blood of his insulter there and then.”
“I daresay,” said M’Iver. “You’re a hot-headed clan. And MacCailein has his own ways.”
“He’s welcome to keep them too,” answered the young fellow, his sneer in no ways abated I became afraid that his carefully curbed tongue would not give us our opening before we parted, and was inclined to force his hand; but M’Iver came in quickly and more astutely.
“How?” said he; “what’s your meaning? Are you in the notions that he has anything to learn of courtesy and gallantry on the other side of the loch at Strath-lachlan?”
MacLachlan’s eyes faltered a little under his pent brows. Perhaps he had a suspicion of the slightest that he was being goaded on for some purpose, but if he had, his temper was too raw to let him qualify his retort with calmness.
“Do you know, Barbreck,” said he, “I would not care to say much about what your nobleman has to learn or unlearn? As for the gallantry—good Lord, now!—did you ever hear of one of my house leaving his men to shift for themselves when blows were going?”
M’Iver with an utterance the least thought choked by an anger due to the insult he had wrought for, shrugged his shoulders, and at the same time gave me his elbow in the side for his sign.
“I’m sorry to hear you say that about Gillesbeg Gruamach,” said he. “Some days ago, half as much from you would have called for my correction; but I’m out of his lordship’s service, as the rumour rightly goes, and seeing the manner of my leaving it was as it was, I have no right to be his advocate now.”
“But I have!” said I, hotly, stopping and facing MacLachlan, with my excuse for the quarrel now ready. “Do you dare come here and call down the credit of MacCailein Mor?” I demanded in the English, with an idea of putting him at once in a fury at having to reply in a language he spoke but indifferently.
His face blanched; he knew I was doubling my insult for him. The skin of his jaw twitched and his nostrils expanded; a hand went to his dirk hilt on the moment.
“And is it that you are the advocate?” he cried to me in a laughable kind of Scots. I was bitter enough to mock his words and accent with the airs of one who has travelled far and knows other languages than his own.
“Keep to your Gaelic,” he cried in that language; “the other may be good enough to be insolent in; let us have our own for courtesies.”
“Any language,” said I, “is good enough to throw the lie in your face when you call MacCailein a coward.”
“Grace of God!” said he; “I called him nothing of the kind; but it’s what he is all the same.”
Up came his valet and stood at his arm, his blade out, and his whole body ready to spring at a signal from his master.
I kept my anger out of my head, and sunk to the pit of my stomach while I spoke to him. “You have said too much about Archibald, Marquis of Argile,” I said. “A week or two ago, the quarrel was more properly M’Iver’s; now that he’s severed by his own act from the clan, I’m ready to take his place and chastise you for your insolence. Are you willing, John?” I asked, turning to my friend.
“If I cannot draw a sword for my cousin I can at least second his defender,” he answered quickly. MacLachlan’s colour came back; he looked from one to the other of us, and made an effort to laugh with cunning.
“There’s more here than I can fathom, gentlemen.” said he. “I’ll swear this is a forced quarrel; but in any case I fear none of you. Alasdair,” he said, turning to his man, who it seemed was his dalta or foster-brother, “we’ll accommodate those two friends of ours when and where they like.”
“Master,” cried the gillie, “I would like well to have this on my own hands,” and he looked at me with great venom as he spoke.
MacLachlan laughed. “They may do their dangerous work by proxy in this part of the shire,” said he; “but I think our own Cowal ways are better; every man his own quarrel.”
“And now is the time to settle it,” said I; “the very place for our purpose is less than a twenty minutes’ walk off.”
Not a word more was said; the four of us stepped out again.
We went along the road two and two, M’Iver keeping company behind with the valet, who would have stabbed me in the back in all likelihood ere we had made half our journey, had there been no such caution. We walked at a good pace, and fast as we walked it was not fast enough for my eagerness, so that my long steps set the shorter ones of MacLachlan pattering beside me in a most humorous way that annoyed him much, to judge from the efforts he made to keep time and preserve his dignity. Not a word, good or bad, was exchanged between us; he left the guidance to me, and followed without a pause when, over the tip of the brae at Tarra Dubh, I turned sharply to the left and plunged into the wood.
In this part of the wood there is a larach or site of an ancient church. No stone stands there to-day, no one lives who has known another who has heard another say he has seen a single stone of this umquhile house of God; but the sward lies flat and square as in a garden, levelled, and in summer fringed with clusters of the nettle that grows over the ruins of man with a haste that seems to mock the brevity of his interests, and the husbandman and the forester for generations have put no spade to its soil. A cill or cell we call it in the language; and the saying goes among the people of the neighbourhood that on the eve of Saint Patrick bells ring in this glade in the forest, sweet, soft, dreamy bells, muffled in a mist of years—bells whose sounds have come, as one might fancy, at their stated interval, after pealing in a wave about God’s universe from star to star, back to the place of their first chiming. Ah! the monk is no longer there to hear them, only the mavis calls and the bee in its period hums where matins rose. A queer thought this, a thought out of all keeping with my bloody mission in the wood, which was to punish this healthy youth beside me; yet to-day, looking back on the occasion, I do not wonder that, going a-murdering, my mind in that glade should soften by some magic of its atmosphere. For, ever was I a dreamer, as this my portion of history may long since have disclosed. Ever must I be fronting the great dumb sorrow of the universe, thinking of loves undone, of the weakness of man, poor man, a stumbler under the stars, the sickening lapse of time, the vast and awesome voids left by people dead, laughter quelled, eyes shut for evermore, and scenes evanished. And it was ever at the crisis of things my mind took on this mood of thought and pity.
It was not of my own case I reflected there, but of the great swooning silences that might be tenanted ere the sun dropped behind the firs by the ghost of him I walked with. Not of my own father, but of an even older man in a strath beyond the water hearing a rap at his chamber door to-night and a voice of horror tell him he had no more a son. A fool, a braggart, a liar the less, but still he must leave a vacancy at the hearth! My glance could not keep off the shoulder of him as he walked cockily beside me, a healthy brown upon his neck, and I shivered to think of this hour as the end of him, and of his clay in a little stretched upon the grass that grew where psalm had chanted and the feet of holy men had passed. Kill him! The one thrust of fence I dare not neglect was as sure as the arrow of fate; I knew myself in my innermost his executioner.
It was a day, I have said, of exceeding calm, with no trace left almost of the winter gone, and the afternoon came on with a crimson upon the west, and numerous birds in flying companies settled upon the bushes. The firs gave a perfume from their tassels and plumes, and a little burn among the bushes gurgled so softly, so like a sound of liquor in a goblet, that it mustered the memories of good companionship. No more my mind was on the knave and liar, but on the numerous kindnesses of man.
We stepped in upon the bare larach with the very breath checked upon our lips. The trees stood round it and back, knowing it sanctuary; tall trees, red, and rough at the hide, cracked and splintered in roaring storms; savage trees, coarse and vehement, but respecting that patch of blessed memory vacant quite but of ourselves and a little bird who turned his crimson breast upon us for a moment then vanished with a thrill of song. Crimson sky, crimson-vested bird, the colour of that essence I must be releasing with the push of a weapon at that youth beside me!
John Splendid was the first to break upon the silence.
“I was never so much struck with the Sunday feeling of a place,” he said; “I daresay we could find a less melancholy spot for our meeting if we searched for it, but the day goes, and I must not be putting off an interesting event both of you, I’m sure, are eager to begin.”
“Indeed we might have got a more suitable place in many ways,” I confessed, my hands behind me, with every scrap of passion gone from my heart.
MacLachlan showed no such dubiety. “What ails you at the place?” he asked, throwing his plaid to his servant, and running his jacket off its wooden buttons at one tug. “It seems to me a most particularly fine place for our business. But of course,” he added with a sneer, “I have not the experience of two soldiers by trade, who are so keen to force the combat.”
He threw off his belt, released the sword from its scabbard—a clumsy weapon of its kind, abrupt, heavy, and ill-balanced, I could tell by its slow response to his wrist as he made a pass or two in the air to get the feel of it. He was in a cold bravado, the lad, with his spirit up, and utterly reckless of aught that might happen him, now saying a jocular word to his man, and now gartering his hose a little more tightly.
I let myself be made ready by John Splendid without so much as putting a hand to a buckle, for I was sick sorry that we had set out upon this adventure. Shall any one say fear? It was as far from fear as it was from merriment. I have known fear in my time—the fear of the night, of tumultuous sea, of shot-ploughed space to be traversed inactively and slowly, so my assurance is no braggadocio, but the simple truth. The very sword itself, when I had it in my hand, felt like something alive and vengeful.
Quick as we were in preparing, the sun was quicker in descending, and as we faced each other, without any of the parades of foreign fence, the sky hung like a bloody curtain between the trees behind MacLachlan.
M’Iver and the servant now stood aside and the play began. MacLachlan engaged with the left foot forward, the trick of a man who is used to the targaid, and I saw my poor fool’s doom in the antiquity of his first guard. In two minutes I had his whole budget of the art laid bare to me; he had but four parries—quarte and tierce for the high lines, with septime and second for the low ones—and had never seen a counter-parry or lunge in the whole course of his misspent life.
“Little hero!” thought I, “thou art a spitted cockerel already, and yet hope, the blind, the ignorant, has no suspicion of it!”
A faint chill breeze rose and sighed among the wood, breathed from the west that faced me, a breeze bearing the odour of the tree more strong than before, and of corrupt leafage in the heughs. Our weapons tinkled and rasped, the true-points hissed and the pommels rang, and into the midst of this song of murderous game there trespassed the innocent love-lilt of a bird. I risked him the flash of an eye as he stood, a becking black body on a bough, his yellow beak shaking out a flutey note of passionate serenade. Thus the irony of nature; no heed for us, the head and crown of things created: the bird would build its home and hatch its young upon the sapling whose roots were soaked by young MacLachlan’s blood.
His blood! That was now the last thing I desired. He fought with suppleness and strength, if not with art; he fought, too, with venom in his strokes, his hair tossed high upon his temples, his eyes the whitest of his person, as he stood, to his own advantage, that I never grudged him, with his back against the sunset I contented with defence till he cursed with a baffled accent. His man called piteously and eagerly; but M’Iver checked him, and the fight went on. Not the lunge, at least, I determined, though the punishment of a trivial wound was scarce commensurate with his sin. So I let him slash and sweat till I wearied of the game, caught his weapon in the curved guard of my hilt, and broke it in two.
He dropped the fragment in his hand with a cry of mingled anger and despair, snatched a knife from his stocking, and rushed on me to stab. Even then I had him at my mercy. As he inclosed, I made a complete volte with the left foot, passed back my right in rear of his, changed my sword into my left hand, holding it by the middle of the blade and presenting the point at his throat, while my right hand, across his body, seized his wrist.
For a moment I felt the anger at his treachery almost overmaster me. He thought himself gone. He let his head fall helplessly on my breast, and stood still as one waiting the stroke, with his eyes, as M’Iver told me again, closed and his mouth parted. But a spasm of disgust at the uncleanness of the task to be done made me retch and pause.
“Home, dog!” I gasped, and I threw him from me sprawling on the sod. He fell, in his weariness, in an awkward and helpless mass; the knife, still in his hand, pierced him on the shoulder, and thus the injury I could not give him by my will was given him by Providence. Over on his back he turned with a plash of blood oozing at his shirt, and he grasped with clawing fingers to stanch it, yet never relinquishing his look of bitter anger at me. With cries, with tears, with names of affection, the gillie ran to his master, who I saw was not very seriously injured.
M’Iver helped me on with my coat.
“You’re far too soft, man!” he said. “You would have let him go scathless, and even now he has less than his deserts. You have a pretty style of fence, do you know, and I should like to see it paraded against a man more your equal.”
“You’ll never see it paraded by me,” I answered, sorrowfully. “Here’s my last duello, if I live a thousand years.” And I went up and looked at my fallen adversary. He was shivering with cold, though the sweat hung upon the young down of his white cheeks, for the night air was more bitter every passing moment The sun was all down behind the hills, the valley was going to rest, the wood was already in obscurity. If our butcher-work had seemed horrible in that sanctuary in the open light of day, now in the eve it seemed more than before a crime against Heaven. The lad weltering, with no word or moan from his lips; the servant stanching his wound, shaken the while by brotherly tears; M’Iver, the old man-at-arms, indifferent, practised to such sights, and with the heart no longer moved by man-inflicted injury; and over all a brooding silence; over all that place, consecrated once to God and prayer by men of peace, but now degraded to a den of beasts—over it shone of a sudden the new wan crescent moon! I turned me round, I turned and fell to weeping in my hands!
This abject surrender of mine patently more astounded the company than had the accident to MacLachlan. M’Iver stood dumfounded, to behold a cavalier of fortune’s tears, and MacLachlan’s face, for all his pain, gave up its hate and anger for surprise, as he looked at me over the shoulder of his kneeling clansman plying rude leech-craft on his wound.
“Are you vexed?” said he, with short breaths.
“And that bitterly!” I answered.
“Oh, there is nothing to grieve on,” said he, mistaking me most lamentably. “I’ll give you your chance again. I owe you no less; but my knife, if you’ll believe me, sprang out of itself, and I struck at you in a ruddy mist of the senses.”
“I seek no other chance,” I said; “our feuds are over: you were egged on by a subterfuge, deceit has met deceit, and the balance is equal.”
His mood softened, and we helped him to his feet, M’Iver a silent man because he failed to comprehend this turn of affairs. We took him to a cothouse down at the foot of the wood, where he lay while a boy was sent for a skilly woman.
In life, as often as in the stories of man’s invention, it is the one wanted who comes when the occasion needs, for God so arranges, and if it may seem odd that the skilly woman the messenger brought back with him for the dressing of MacLachlan’s wound was no other than our Dark Dame of Lorn, the dubiety must be at the Almighty’s capacity, and not at my chronicle of the circumstance. As it happened, she had come back from Dalness some days later than ourselves, none the worse for her experience among the folks of that unchristian neighbourhood, who had failed to comprehend that the crazy tumult of her mind might, like the sea, have calm in its depths, and that she was more than by accident the one who had alarmed us of their approach. She had come back with her frenzy reduced, and was now with a sister at Balantyre the Lower, whose fields slope on Aora’s finest bend.
For skill she had a name in three parishes; she had charms sure and certain for fevers and hoasts; the lives of children were in her hands while yet their mothers bore them; she knew manifold brews, decoctions, and clysters; at morning on the saints’ days she would be in the woods, or among the rocks by the rising of the sun, gathering mosses and herbs and roots that contain the very juices of health and the secret of age. I little thought that day when we waited for her, and my enemy lay bleeding on the fern, that she would bring me the cure for a sore heart, the worst of all diseases.
While M’Iver and I and the gillie waited the woman’s coming, MacLachlan tossed in a fever, his mind absent and his tongue running on without stoppage, upon affairs of a hundred different hues, but all leading sooner or later to some babble about a child. It was ever “the dear child,” the “m’eudailgheal” “the white treasure,” “the orphan “; it was always an accent of the most fond and lingering character. I paid no great heed to this constant wail; but M’Iver pondered and studied, repeating at last the words to himself as MacLachlan uttered them.
“If that’s not the young one in Carlunnan he harps on,” he concluded at last, “I’m mistaken. He seems even more wrapt in the child than does the one we know who mothers it now, and you’ll notice, by the way, he has nothing to say of her.”
“Neither he has,” I confessed, well enough pleased with a fact he had no need to call my attention to.
“Do you know, I’m on the verge of a most particular deep secret?” said John, leaving me to guess what he was at, but I paid no heed to him.
The skilly dame came in with her clouts and washes. She dressed the lad’s wound and drugged him to a more cooling slumber, and he was to be left in bed till the next day.
“What’s all his cry about the child?” asked M’Iver, indifferently, as we stood at the door before leaving. “Is it only a fancy on his brain, or do you know the one he speaks of?”
She put on a little air of vanity, the vanity of a woman who knows a secret the rest of the world, and man particularly, is itching to hear. “Oh, I daresay he has some one in his mind,” she admitted; “and I daresay I know who it might be too, for I was the first to sweel the baby and the last to dress its mother—blessing with her!”
M’I ver turned round and looked her, with cunning humour, in the face. “I might well guess that,” he said; “you have the best name in the countryside for these offices, that many a fumbling dame botches. I suppose,” he added, when the pleasure in her face showed his words had found her vanity—“I suppose you mean the bairn up in Carlunnan?”
“That’s the very one,” she said with a start; “but who told you?”
“Tuts!” said he, slyly, “the thing’s well enough known about the Castle, and MacLachlan himself never denied he was the father. Do you think a secret like that could be kept in a clattering parish like Inneraora?”
“You’re the first I ever heard get to the marrow of it,” confessed the Dame Dubh. “MacLachlan himself never thought I was in the woman’s confidence, and I’ve seen him in Carlunnan there since I came home, pretending more than a cousin’s regard for the Provost’s daughter so that he might share in the bairn’s fondling. He did it so well, too, that the lady herself would talk of its fatherless state with tears in her eyes.”
I stood by, stunned at the revelation that brought joy from the very last quarter where I would have sought it. But I must not let my rapture at the idea of MacLachlan’s being no suitor of the girl go too far till I confirmed this new intelligence.
“Perhaps,” I said in a little to the woman, “the two of them fondling the bairn were chief enough, though they did not share the secret of its fatherhood.”
“Chief!” she cried; “the girl has no more notion of MacLachlan than I have, if an old woman’s eyes that once were clear enough for such things still show me anything. I would have been the first to tell her how things stood if I had seen it otherwise. No, no; Mistress Brown has an eye in other quarters. What do you say to that, Barbreck?” she added, laughing slyly to my friend.
A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lain on it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or pretended to find, in my silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future. And then this rapture was followed by a gladness no less profound that Mac-Lachlan, bad as he had been, was not the villain quite I had fancied: if he had bragged of conquests, it had been with truth though not with decency.
Inneraora, as we returned to it that night, was a town enchanted; again its lights shone warm and happily. I lingered late in its street, white in the light of the stars, and looked upon the nine windows of Askaig’s house. There was no light in all the place; the lower windows of the tenement were shuttered, and slumber was within. It gave me an agreeable exercise to guess which of the unshuttered nine would let in the first of the morning light on a pillow with dark hair tossed upon it and a rounded cheek upon a hand like milk.