John Splendid Part 37

Seventeen years later, if I may quit the thread of my history and take in a piece that more properly belongs to the later adventures of John Splendid, I saw my lord die by the maiden. Being then in his tail, I dined with him and his friends the day before he died, and he spoke with exceeding cheerfulness of that hour M'Iver and I found him in bed in Inneraora. "You saw me at my worst," said he, "on two occasions; bide till to-morrow and you'll see me at my best I never unmasked to mortal man till that day Gordon put you out of my room." I stayed and saw him die; I saw his head up and his chin in the air as behoved his quality, that day he went through that noisy, crowded, causied Edinburgh--Edinburgh of the doleful memories, Edinburgh whose ports I never enter till this day but I feel a tickling at the nape of my neck, as where a wooden collar should lie before the shear fall.

"A cool enough reception this," said M'Iver, as we left the gate. "It was different last year, when we went up together on your return from Low Germanie. Then MacCailein was in the need of soldiers, now he's in the need of priests, who gloze over his weakness with their prayers."

"You are hardly fair either to the one or the other," I said. "Argile, whom I went in to meet to-day with a poor regard for him, turns out a better man than I gave him credit for being; he has at least the grace to grieve about a great error of judgment, or weakness of the spirit, whichever it may be. And as for Master Gordon, I'll take off my hat to him. Yon's no type of the sour, dour, anti-prelatics; he comes closer on the perfect man and soldier than any man I ever met."

M'Iver looked at me with a sign of injured vanity.

"You're not very fastidious in your choice of comparisons," said he. "As for myself, I cannot see much more in Gordon than what he is paid for--a habit of even temper, more truthfulness than I have myself, and that's a dubious virtue, for see the impoliteness that's always in its train! Add to that a lack of any clannish regard for MacCailein Mor, whom he treats just like a common merchant, and that's all. Just a plain, stout, fozy, sappy burrow-man, keeping a gospel shop, with scarcely so much of a man's parts as will let him fend a blow in the face. I could march four miles for his one, and learn him the A B _ab_ of every manly art."

"I like you fine, man," I cried; "I would sooner go tramping the glens with you any day than Master Gordon; but that's a weakness of the imperfect and carnal man, that cares not to have a conscience at his coat-tail every hour of the day: you have your own parts and he his, and his parts are those that are not very common on our side of the country--more's the pity."

M'Iver was too busy for a time upon the sudden rupture with Argile to pay very much heed to my defence of Master Gordon. The quarrel--to call that a quarrel in which one man had all the bad temper and the other nothing but self-reproach--had soured him of a sudden as thunder turns the morning's cream to curd before noon. And his whole demeanour revealed a totally new man. In his ordinary John was very pernicketty about his clothing, always with the most shining of buckles and b.u.t.tons, always trim in plaiding, snod and spruce about his hair and his hosen, a real dandy who never overdid the part, but just contrived to be pleasant to the eye of women, who, in my observation, have, the most sensible of them, as great a contempt for the mere fop as they have for the sloven.

It took, indeed, trimness of apparel to make up for the plainness of his face. Not that he was ugly or harsh-favoured,--he was too genial for either; he was simply well-favoured enough to pa.s.s in a fair, as the saying goes, which is a midway between Apollo and plain Donald But what with a jacket and vest all creased for the most apparent reasons, a plaid frayed to ribbons in dashing through the wood of Dalness, brogues burst at the toes, and a bonnet soaked all out of semblance to itself by rains, he appeared more common. The black temper of him transformed his face too: it lost the geniality that was its main charm, and out of his eyes flamed a most wicked, cunning, cruel fellow.

He went down the way from the castle brig to the "arches cursing with great eloquence. A soldier picks up many tricks of blasphemy in a career about the world with foreign legions, and John had the reddings of three or four languages at his command, so that he had no need to repeat himself much in his choice of terms aboat his chief. To do him justice he had plenty of condemnation for himself too.

"Well," said I, "you were inclined to be calm enough with MacCailein when first we entered his room. I suppose all this uproar is over his charge of flattery, not against yourself alone but against all the people about."

"That's just the thing," he cried, turning round and throwing his arms furiously about "Could he not have charged the clan generally, and let who would put the cap on? If yon's the policy of Courts, heaven help princes!"

"And yet you were very humble when you entered," I protested.

"Was I that?" he retorted. "That's easy to account for. Did you ever feel like arguing with a gentleman when you had on your second-best clothes and no ruffle? The man was in his bed, and his position as he c.o.c.ked up there on his knees was not the most dignified I have seen; but even then he had the best of it, for I felt like a beggar before him in my shabby duds. Oh, he had the best of us all there! You saw Gordon had the sense to put on a new surtout and clean linen and a freshly dressed peruke before he saw him; I think he would scarcely have been so bold before Argile if he had his breek-bands a finger-length below his belt, and his wig on the nape of his neck as we saw him in Glencoe."

"Anyhow," said I, "you have severed from his lordship; are you really going abroad?"

He paused a second in thought, smiled a little, and then laughed as if he had seen something humorous.

"Man," said he, "didn't I do the dirk trick with a fine touch of n.o.bility? Maybe you thought it was done on the impulse and without any calculation. The truth was, I played the whole thing over in my mind while he was in the preliminaries of his discourse. I saw he was working up to an attack, and I knew I could surprise him. But I must confess I said more than I intended. When I spoke of the big wars and Hebron's troopers--well, Argile's a very nice shire to be living in."

"What, was it all play-acting then?"

He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

"You must be a singularly simple man, Elrigmore," he said, "to ask that of any one. Are we not play-acting half our lives once we get a little beyond the stage of the ploughman and the herd? Half our tears and half our laughter and the great bulk of our virtues are like your way of c.o.c.king your bonnet over your right ear; it does not come by nature, and it is done to pleasure the world in general Play-acting! I'll tell you this, Colin, I could scarcely say myself when a pa.s.sion of mine is real or fancied now. But I can tell you this too; if I began in play to revile the Marquis, I ended in earnest I'm afraid it's all bye with me yonder. No more mine-managing for me; I struck too close on the marrow for him to forget it."

"He has forgotten and forgiven it already," I cried "At least, let us hope he has not forgotten it (for you said no more than was perhaps deserved), but at least it's forgiven. If you said to-morrow that you were sorry for your temper----"

"Said ten thousand fiends in h.e.l.l!" cried M'Iver. "I may be vexed I angered the man; but I'll never let him know it by my words, if he cannot make it out from my acts."

CHAPTER x.x.xI.--MISTRESS BETTY.

I dressed myself up in the morning with scrupulous care, put my hair in a queue, shaved cheek and chin, and put at my shoulder the old heirloom brooch of the house, which, with some other property, the invaders had not found below the _bruach_ where we had hid it on the day we had left Elngmore to their mercy. I was all in a tremor of expectation, hot and cold by turns in hope and apprehension, but always with a singular uplifting at the heart, because for good or ill I was sure to meet in the next hour or two the one person whose presence in Inneraora made it the finest town in the world. Some men tell me they have felt the experience more than once; light o' loves they, errant gallants, I'll swear (my dear) the tingle of it came to me but at the thought of meeting one woman. Had she been absent from Inneraora that morning I would have avoided it like a leper-house because of its gloomy memorials; but the very reek of its repairing tenements as I saw them from the upper windows of my home floating in a haze against the blue over the shoulder of Dun Torvil seemed to call me on. I went about the empty chambers carolling like the bird. Aumrie and clothes-press were burst and vacant, the rooms in all details were bereft and cheerless because of the plenishing stolen, and my father sat among his losses and mourned, but I made light of our spoiling.

As if to heighten the rapture of my mood, the day was full of sunshine, and though the woods crowding the upper glen were leafless and slumbering, they were touched to something like autumn's gold. Some people love the country but in the time of leaf.a.ge! And laden with delights in every season of the year, and the end of winter as cheery a period as any, for I know that the buds are pressing at the bark, and that the boughs in rumours of wind stretch out like the arms of the sleeper who will soon be full awake.

Down I went stepping to a merry lilt, banishing every fear from my thoughts, and the first call I made was on the Provost. He was over in Akaig's with his wife and family pending the repair of his own house, and Askaig was off to his estate. Master Brown sat on the bal.u.s.ters of the outer stair, dangling his squat legs and studying through horn specs the talc of thig and theft which the town officer had made up a report on. As I put my foot on the bottom step he looked up, and his welcome was most friendly.

"Colin! Colin!" he cried, hastening down to shake me by the hand, "come your ways in. I heard you got home yesterday, and I was sure you would give us a call in the by-going to-day. And you're little the waur of your jaunt-hale and hearty. We ken all about your prisoning; M'Iver was in last night and kept the crack going till morning--a most humorous devil."

He pinched rappee as he spoke, in rapid doses from a snuff-box, and spread the brown powder in extravagant carelessness over his vest.

He might affect what light-heartedness he could; I saw that the past fortnight had made a difference for the worse on him. The pouches below the eyes had got heavier and darker, the lines had deepened on his brow, the ruddy polish had gone off his cheek, and it was dull and spotted; by ten o'clock at night-when he used to be very jovial over a gla.s.s--I could tell he would be haggard and yawning. At his years men begin to age in a few hours; a sudden wrench to the affections, or shock to a long-disciplined order of things in their lives, will send them staggering down off the braehead whereon they have been perched with a good balance so long that they themselves have forgot the natural course of human man is to be progressing somewhere.

"Ah, lad, lad! haven't we the times?" he said, as he led me within to the parlour. "Inneraora in the stour in her reputation as well as in her tenements. I wish the one could be amended as readily as the other; but we mustn't be saying a word against princes, ye ken," he went on in the discreet whisper of the conspirator. "You were up and saw him last night, I'm hearing. To-day they tell me he's himself again, and coming down to a session meeting at noon. I must put myself in his way to say a friendly word or two. Ah! you're laughing at us. I understand, man, I understand. You travellers need not practise the art of civility; but we're too close on the castle here to be out of favour with MacCailein Mor. Draw in your chair, and--Mary, Mary, goodwife! bring in the bottle with you and see young Elrigmore."

In came the goodwife with even greater signs of trouble than her husband, but all in a flurry of good-humoured welcome. They sat, the pair of them, before me in a little room poorly lit by a narrow window but half-glazed, because a lower portion of it had been destroyed in the occupation of the Irish, and had to be timbered up to keep the wind outside. A douce pathetic pair; I let my thoughts stray a little even from their daughter as I looked on them, and pondered on the tragedy of age that is almost as cruel as war, but for the love that set Provost Brown with his chair haffit close against his wife's, so that less noticeably he might take her hand in his below the table and renew the glow that first they learned, no doubt, when lad and la.s.s awandering in summer days, oh long ago, in Eas-a-chosain glen.

They plied me with a hundred questions, of my adventures, and of my father, and of affairs up in Shira Glen. I sat answering very often at hazard, with my mind fixed on the one question I had to ask, which was a simple one as to the whereabouts and condition of their daughter. But I leave to any lad of a shrinking and sensitive nature if this was not a task of exceeding difficulty. For you must remember that here were two very sharp-eyed parents, one of them with a gift of irony discomposing to a lover, and the other or both perhaps, with no reason, so far as I knew, to think I had any special feeling for the girl. But I knew as well as if I had gone over the thing a score of times before, how my manner of putting that simple question would reveal me at a flash to the irony of the father and the wonder of the mother. And in any case they gave me not the smallest chance of putting it As they plied me with affairs a thousand miles beyond the limits of my immediate interest, and I answered them with a brevity almost discourteous, I was practising two or three phrases in my mind.

"And how is your daughter, sir?" might seem simple enough, but it would be too cold for an inquirer to whom hitherto she had always been Betty; while to ask for Betty outright would--a startling new spring of delicacy in my nature told me--be to use a friendly warmth only the most cordial relations with the girl would warrant No matter how I mooted the lady, I knew something in my voice and the very flush in my face would reveal my secret My position grew more pitiful every moment, for to the charge of cowardice I levelled first at myself for my backwardness, there was the charge of discourtesy. What could they think of ray breeding that I had not mentioned their daughter? What could I think from their silence regarding her but that they were vexed at my indifference to her, and with the usual Highland pride were determined not even to mention her name till she was asked for. Upon my word, I was in a trouble more distressing than when I sat in the mist in the Moor of Rannoch and confessed myself lost! I thought for a little, in a momentary wave of courage, of leading the conversation in her direction by harking back to the day when the town was abandoned, and she took flight with the child into the woods. Still the Provost, now doing all the talking, while his wife knit hose, would ever turn a hundred by-ways from the main road I sought to lead him on.

By-and-by, when the crack had drifted hopelessly away from all connection with Mistress Betty, there was a woman's step on the stair.

My face became as hot as fire at the sound, and I leaned eagerly forward in my chair before I thought of the transparency of the movement.

The Provost's eyes closed to little slits in his face; the corner of his mouth curled in amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Here's Peggy back from Bailie Campbell's," he said to his wife, and I was convinced he did so to let me know the new-comer, who was now moving about in the kitchen across the lobby, was not the one I had expected.

My disappointment must have shown in my face; I felt I was wasting moments the most precious, though it was something to be under the same roof as my lady's relatives, under the same roof as she had slept below last night, and to see some of her actual self almost, in the smiles and eyes and turns of the voice of her mother. I stood up to go, slyly casting an eye about the chamber for the poor comfort of seeing so little as a ribbon or a shoe that was hers, but even that was denied me. The Provost, who, I'll swear now, knew my trouble from the outset, though his wife was blind to it, felt at last constrained to relieve it.

"And you must be going," he said; "I wish you could have waited to see Betty, who's on a visit to Carlunnan and should be home by now."

As he said it, he was tapping his snuff-mull and looking at me pawkily out of the corners of his eyes, that hovered between me and his wife, who stood with the wool in her hand, beaming mildly up in my face. I half turned on my heel and set a restless gaze on the corner of the room. For many considerations were in his simple words. That he should say them at all relieved the tension of my wonder; that he should say them in the way he did, was, in a manner, a manifestation that he guessed the real state of ray feelings to the lady whose very name I had not dared to mention to him, and that he was ready to favour any suit I pressed I was even inclined to push my reading of his remark further, and say to myself that if he had not known the lady herself favoured me, he would never have fanned my hope by even so little as an indifferent sentence.

"And how is she--how is Betty?" I asked, lamely.

He laughed with a pleasing slyness, and gave me a dunt with his elbow on the side, a bit of the faun, a bit of the father, a bit of my father's friend.

"You're too blate, Colin," he said, and then he put his arm through his wife's and gave her a squeeze to take her into his joke. I would have laughed at the humour of it but for the surprise in the good woman's face. It fair startled me, and yet it was no more than the look of a woman who leams that her man and she have been close company with a secret for months, and she had never made its acquaintance. There was perhaps a little more, a hesitancy in the utterance, a flush, a tone that seemed to show the subject was one to be pa.s.sed bye as fast as possible.

She smiled feebly a little, picked up a row of dropped st.i.tches, and "Oh, Betty," said she, "Betty--is--is--she'll be back in a little. Will you not wait?"

"No, I must be going," I said; "I may have the happiness of meeting her before I go up the glen in the afternoon."

They pressed me both to stay, but I seemed, in my mind, to have a new demand upon me for an immediate and private meeting with the girl; she must be seen alone, and not in presence of the old couple, who would give my natural shyness in her company far more gawkiness than it might have if I met her alone.

I went out and went down the stair, and along the front of the land, my being in a tumult, yet with my observation keen to everything, no matter how trivial, that happened around me. The sea-gulls, that make the town the playground of their stormy holidays, swept and curved among the pigeons in the gutter and quarrelled over the spoils; tossed in the air wind-blown, then dropped with feet outstretched upon the black joists and window-sills. Fowls of the midden, new brought from other parts to make up the place of those that had gone to the kail-pots of Antrim and Athole, stalked about with heads high, foreign to this causied and gravelled country, clucking eagerly for meat I made my way amid the bird of the sea and the bird of the wood and common bird of the yard with a divided mind, seeing them with the eye for future recollection, but seeing them not Peats were at every close-mouth, at every door almost that was half-habitable, and fuel cut from the wood, and all about the thoroughfare was embarra.s.sed.

I had a different decision at every step, now to seek the girl, now to go home, now finding the most heartening hints in the agitation of the parents, anon troubled exceedingly with the reflection that there was something of an unfavourable nature in the demeanour of her mother, however much the father's badinage might soothe my vanity.

I had made up my mind for the twentieth time to go the length of Carlunnan and face her plump and plain, when behold she came suddenly round the corner at the Maltland where the surviving Lowland troops were gathered! M'Iver was with her, and my resolution shrivelled and shook within me like an old nut kernel. I would have turned but for the stupidity and ill-breeding such a movement would evidence, yet as I held on my way at a slower pace and the pair approached, I felt every limb an enc.u.mbrance, I felt the country lout throbbing in every vein.

Betty almost ran to meet me as we came closer together, with an agreeableness that might have pleased me more had I not the certainty that she would have been as warm to either of the two men who had rescued her from her hiding in the wood of Strongara, and had just come back from her country's battles with however small credit to themselves in the result. She was in a very happy mood, for, like all women, she could readily forget the large and general vexation of a reverse to her people in war if the immediate prospect was not unpleasant and things around were showing improvement Her eyes shone and sparkled, the ordinary sedate flow of her words was varied by little outbursts of gaiety. She had been visiting the child at Carlunnan, where it had been adopted by her kinswoman, who made a better guardian than its grandmother, who died on her way to Dunbarton.

"What sets you on this road?" she asked blandly.

"Oh, you have often seen me on this road before," I said, boldly and with meaning. Ere I went wandering we had heard the rivers sing many a time, and sat upon its banks and little thought life and time were pa.s.sing as quickly as the leaf or bubble on the surface. She flushed ever so little at the remembrance, and threw a stray curl back from her temples with an impatient toss of her fingers.