John Splendid Part 16

I went forward at a bound, in a stupid rapture that made her shrink in alarm; but M'Iver lingered in the rear, with more discretion than my relations to the girl gave occasion for.

"Friends! oh, am not I glad to see yoa?" she said simply, her wan face lighting up. Then she sat down on a hillock and wept in her hands. I gave her awkward comfort, my wits for once failing me, my mind in a confusion, my hands, to my own sense, seeming large, coa.r.s.e, and in the way. Yet to have a finger on her shoulder was a thrill to the heart, to venture a hand on her hair was a pa.s.sionate indulgence.

The bairn joined in her tears till M'Iver took it in his arms. He had a way with little ones that had much of magic in it, and soon this one was nestling to his breast with its sobs sinking, an arm round his neck.

More at the pair of them than at me did Betty look with interest when her tears were concluded.

"Amn't I like myself this morning?" asked John, jocularly, dandling the bairn in his arms.

Betty turned away without a reply, and when the child was put down and ran to her, she scarcely glanced on it, but took it by the hand and made to go before us, through the underwood she had come from.

"Here's my home, gentlemen," she said, "like the castle of Colin Dubh, with the highest ceiling in the world and the stars for candles."

We might have pa.s.sed it a score of times in broad daylight and never guessed its secret. It was the beildy side of the hill. Two fir-trees had fallen at some time in the common fashion of wind-blown pines, with their roots clean out of the earth, and raised up, so that coming together at two edges they made two sides of a triangle. To add to its efficiency as a hiding-place, some young firs grew at the open third side of the triangle.

In this confined little s.p.a.ce (secure enough from any hurried search) there was still a _greasach_ as we call it, the ember of a fire that the girl had kindled with a spark from a flint the night before, to warm the child, and she had kept it at the lowest extremity short of letting it die out altogether, lest it should reveal her whereabouts to any searchers in the wood.

We told her our story and she told us hers. She had fled on the morning of the attack, in the direction of the castle, but found her way cut off by a wing of the enemy, a number of whom chased her as she ran with the child up the river-side to the Cairnbaan, where she eluded her pursuers among his lordship's shrubberies, and discovered a road to the wood. For a week she found shelter and food in a cow-herd's abandoned bothy among the alders of Tarra-dubh; then hunger sent her travelling again, and she reached Leacainn Mhor, where she shared the cotter's house with a widow woman who went out to the burn with a kail-pot and returned no more, for the tardy bullet found her. The murderers were ransacking the house when Betty and the child were escaping through the byre. This place of concealment in Strongara she sought by the advice of a Glencoe man well up in years, who came on her suddenly, and, touched by her predicament, told her he and his friends had so well beaten that place, it was likely to escape further search.

"And so I am here with my charge," said the girl, affecting a gaiety it were hard for her to feel "I could be almost happy and content, if I were a.s.sured my father and mother were safe, and the rest of my kinsfolk."

"There's but one of them in all the countryside," I said. "Young MacLachlan, and he's on Dunchuach."

To my critical scanning her cheek gave no flag.

"Oh, my cousin!" she said. "I am pleased that he is safe, though I would sooner hear he was in Cowal than in Campbell country."

"He's honoured in your interest, madam," I could not refrain from saying, my attempt at raillery I fear a rather forlorn one.

She flushed at this, but said never a word, only biting her nether lip and fondling the child.

I think we put together a cautious little fire and cooked some oats from my _dorlach_, though the ecstasy of the meeting with the girl left me no great recollection of all that happened. But in a quiet part of the afternoon we sat snugly in our triangle of fir roots and discoursed of trifles that had no reasonable relation to our precarious state. Betty had almost an easy heart, the child slept on my comrade's plaid, and I was content to be in her company and hear the little turns and accents of her voice, and watch the light come and go in her face, and the smile hover, a little wae, on her lips at some pleasant tale of Mover's.

"How came you round about these parts?" she asked--for our brief account of our doings held no explanation of our presence in the wood of Strongara.

"Ask himself here," said John, c.o.c.king a thumb over his shoulder at me; "I have the poorest of scents on the track of a woman."

Betty turned to me with less interest in the question than she had shown when she addressed it first to my friend.

I told her what the Glencoe man had told the parson, and she sighed.

"Poor man!" said she, "(blessing with him!) it was he that sent me here to Strongara, and gave me tinder and flint."

"We could better have spared any of his friends, then," said I. "But you would expect some of us to come in search of you?"

"I did," she said in a hesitancy, and crimsoning in a way that tingled me to the heart with the thought that she meant no other than myself.

She gave a caressing touch to the head of the sleeping child, and turned to M'Iver, who lay on his side with his head propped on an elbow, looking out on the hill-face.

"Do you know the bairn?" she asked.

"No," he said, with a careless look where it lay as peaceful as in a cradle rocked by a mother's foot.

"It's the oe of Peggie Mhor," she said.

"So," said he; "poor dear!" and he turned and looked out again at the snow.

We were, in spite of our dead Glencoe man's a.s.surance, in as wicked a piece of country as well might be. No snow had fallen since we left Tombreck, and from that dolorous ruin almost to our present retreat was the patent track of our march.

"I'm here, and I'm making a fair show at an easy mind," said M'I ver; "but I've been in cheerier circ.u.mstances ere now."

"So have I, for that part of it," said Betty with spirit, half humorously, half in an obvious punctilio.

"Mistress," said he, sitting up gravely, "I beg your pardon. Do you wonder if I'm not in a mood for saying dainty things? Our state's precarious (it's needless to delude ourselves otherwise), and our friend Sandy and his b.l.o.o.d.y gang may be at a javelin's throw from us as we sit here. I wish--"

He saw the girl's face betray her natural alarm, and amended his words almost too quickly for the sake of the illusion.

"Tuts, tuts!" he cried. "I forgot the wood was searched before, and here I'm putting a dismal black face on a drab business. We might be a thousand times worse. I might be a clay-cold corp with my last week's wage unspent in my sporran, as it happens to be, and here I'm to the fore with four or five MacDonalds to my credit If I've lost my mercantile office as mine-manager (curse your trades and callings!) my sword is left me; you have equal fortune, Elrigmore; and you, Mistress Brown, have them you love spared to you."

Again the girl blushed most fiercely. "Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d!" she cried in a stifled ecstasy, "and O! but I'm grateful." And anew she fondled the little bye-blow as it lay with its sunny hair on the soldier's plaid.

John glanced at her from the corners of his eyes with a new expression, and asked her if she was fond of bairns.

"Need you ask that of a woman?" she said. "But for the company of this one on my wanderings, my heart had failed me a hundred times a-day. It was seeing him so helpless that gave me my courage: the dark at night in the bothy and the cot and the moaning wind of this lone spot had sent me crazy if I had not this little one's hand in mine, and his breath in my hair as we lay together."

"To me," said John, "they're like flowers, and that's the long and the short of it."

"You're like most men, I suppose," said Betty, archly; "fond of them in the abstract, and with small patience for the individuals of them. This one now--you would not take half the trouble with him I found a delight in. But the nursing of bairns--even their own--is not a soldier's business."

"No, perhaps not," said M'Iver, surveying her gravely; "and yet I've seen a soldier, a rough hired cavalier, take a wonderful degree of trouble about a duddy little bairn of the enemy in the enemy's country.

He was struck--as he told me after--by the look of it sitting in a scene of carnage, orphaned without the sense of it, and he carried it before him on the saddle for a many leagues' march till he found a peaceful wayside cottage, where he gave it in the charge of as honest a woman, to all appearance, as these parts could boast He might even--for all I know to the contrary--have fairly bought her attention for it by a season's paying of the kreutzers, and I know it cost him a duel with a fool who mocked the sentiment of the deed."

"I hope so brave and good a man was none the worse for his duel in a cause so n.o.ble," said the girl, softly.

"Neither greatly brave nor middling good," said John, laughing, "at least to my way of thinking, and I know him well. But he was no poorer but by the kreutzers for his advocacy of an orphan bairn."

"I think I know the man," said I, innocently, "and his name would be John."

"And John or George," said the girl, "I could love him for his story."

M'Iver lifted a tress of the sleeping child's hair and toyed with it between his fingers.

"My dear, my dear!" said he; "it's a foolish thing to judge a man's character by a trifle like yon: he's a poor creature who has not his fine impulse now and then; and the man I speak of, as like as not, was dirling a wanton flagon (or maybe waur) ere nightfall, or slaying with cruelty and zest the bairn's uncles in the next walled town he came to.

At another mood he would perhaps balance this lock of hair against a company of burghers but fighting for their own fire-end."

"The hair is not unlike your own," said Betty, comparing with quick eyes the curl he held and the curls that escaped from under the edge of his flat blue bonnet.

"May every hair of his be a candle to light him safely through a mirk and dangerous world," said he, and he began to whittle a.s.siduously at a stick, with a little black oxter-knife he lugged from his coat.

"Amen!" said the girl, bravely; "but he were better with the guidance of a good father, and that there seems small likelihood of his enjoying--poor thing!"