John Splendid Part 40

"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 n.o.bleman 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 G.o.d!" 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.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.--THE BROKEN SWORD.

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 G.o.d; but the sward lies flat and square as in a garden, levelled, and in summer fringed with cl.u.s.ters 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, m.u.f.fled in a mist of years--bells whose sounds have come, as one might fancy, at their stated interval, after pealing in a wave about G.o.d'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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 c.o.c.kily 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 gra.s.s that grew where psalm had chanted and the feet of holy men had pa.s.sed. 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 ta.s.sels 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, coa.r.s.e 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 sc.r.a.p of pa.s.sion 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 b.u.t.tons 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce to be traversed inactively and slowly, so my a.s.surance 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 c.o.c.kerel 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 leaf.a.ge 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 trespa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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, pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s; 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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d 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!