John Splendid Part 41

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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstance. 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.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.--LOVE IN THE WOODS.

Young Lachie did not bide long on our side of the water: a day or two and he was away back to his people, but not before he and I, in a way, patched up once more a friendship that had never been otherwise than distant, and was destined so to remain till the end, when he married my aunt, Nannie Ruadh of the Boshang Gate, whose money we had been led to look for as a help to our fallen fortunes. She might, for age, have been his mother, and she was more than a mother to the child he brought to her from Carlunnan without so much as by your leave, the day after they took up house together. "That's my son," said he, "young Lachie." She looked at the st.u.r.dy little fellow beating with a knife upon the bark of an ashen sapling he was fashioning into a whistle, and there was no denying the resemblance. The accident was common enough in those days.

"Who is the mother?" was all she said, with her plump hand on the little fellow's head. "She was So-and-so," answered her husband, looking into the fire; "we were very young, and I've paid the penalty by my rueing it ever since."

Nannie Ruadh took the child to her heart that never knew the glamour of her own, and he grew up, as I could tell in a more interesting tale than this, to be a great and good soldier, who won battles for his country.

So it will be seen that the Dame Dubh's story to us in the cot by Aora had not travelled very far when it had not in six years reached the good woman of Boshang Gate, who knew everybody's affairs between the two stones of the parish. M'Iver and I shared the secret with MacLachlan and the nurse of his dead lover; it went no farther, and it was all the more wonderful that John should keep his thumb on it, considering its relevancy to a blunder that made him seem a scoundrel in the eyes of Mistress Betty. Once I proposed to him that through her father she might have the true state of affairs revealed to her.

"Let her be," he answered, "let her be. She'll learn the truth some day, no doubt." And then, as by a second thought, "The farther off the better, perhaps," a saying full of mystery.

The Dark Dame, as I say, gave me the cure for a sore heart. Her news, so cunningly squeezed from her by John Splendid, relieved me at once of the dread that MacLachlan, by his opportunities of wooing, had made himself secure in her affections, and that those rambles by the river to Carlunnan had been by the tryst of lovers. A wholesome new confidence came to my aid when the Provost, aging and declining day by day to the last stroke that came so soon after, hinted once that he knew no one he would sooner leave the fortunes of his daughter with than with myself.

I mooted the subject to his wife too, in one wild valour of a sudden meeting, and even she, once so shy of the topic, seemed to look upon my suit with favour.

"I could not have a goodson more worthy than yourself," she was kind enough to say. "Once I thought Betty's favour was elsewhere, in an airt that scarcely pleased me, and------"

"But that's all over," I said, warmly, sure she thought of MacLachlan.

"I hope it is; I think it is," she said. "Once I had sharp eyes on my daughter, and her heart's inmost throb was plain to me, for you see, Colin, I have been young myself, long since, and I remember. A brave heart will win the brawest girl, and you have every wish of mine for your good fortune."

Then I played every art of the lover, emboldened the more since I knew she had no tie of engagement. Remembering her father's words in the harvest-field of Elrigmore, I wooed her, not in humility, but in the confidence that, in other quarters, ere she ever came on the scene, had given me liberty on the lips of any girl I met in a lane without more than a laughing protest Love, as I learned now, was not an outcome of the reason but will's mastership. Day by day I contrived to see my lady.

I was cautious to be neither too hot nor too cold, and never but at my best in appearance and in conversation. All my shyness I thrust under my feet: there is one way to a woman's affections, and that is frankness to the uttermost. I thought no longer, ere I spoke, if this sentiment should make me ridiculous, or that sentiment too readily display my fondness, but spoke out as one in a mere gallantry.

At first she was half alarmed at the new mood I was in, shrinking from this, my open revelation, and yet, I could see, not unpleased altogether that she should be the cause of a change so much to my advantage. I began to find a welcome in her smile and voice when I called on the household of an afternoon or evening, on one pretext or another, myself ashamed sometimes at the very flimsiness of them. She would be knitting by the fire perhaps, and it pleased me greatly by some design of my conversation to make her turn at once her face from the flames whose rosiness concealed her flushing, and reveal her confusion to'the yellow candle-light. Oh! happy days. Oh! times so gracious, the spirit and the joy they held are sometimes with me still. We revived, I think, the glow of that meeting on the stair when I came home from Germanie, and the hours pa.s.sed in swallow flights as we talked of summer days gone bye.

At last we had even got the length of walking together in an afternoon or evening in the wood behind the town that has been the haunt in courting days of generations of our young people: except for a little melancholy in my lady, these were perhaps life's happiest periods. The wind might be sounding and the old leaves flying in the wood, the air might chill and nip, but there was no bitterness for us in the season's chiding. To-day, an old man, with the follies of youth made plain and contemptible, I cannot but think those eves in the forest had something precious and magic for memory. There is no sorrow in them but that they are no more, and that the world to come may have no repet.i.tion. How the trees, the tall companions, communed together in their heights among the stars! how the burns tinkled in the gra.s.ses and the howlets mourned.

And we, together, walked sedate and slowly in those evening alleys, surrounded by the scents the dews bring forth, shone upon by silver moon and stars.

To-day, in my eld, it amuses me still that for long I never kissed her.

I had been too slow of making a trial, to venture it now without some effort of spirit; and time after time I had started on our stately round of the hunting-road with a resolution wrought up all the way from my looking-gla.s.s at Elrigmore, that this should be the night, if any, when I should take the liberty that surely our rambles, though actual word of love had not been spoken, gave me a t.i.tle to. A t.i.tle! I had kissed many a bigger girl before in a caprice at a hedge-gate. But this little one, so demurely walking by my side, with never so much as an arm on mine, her pale face like marble in the moonlight, her eyes, when turned on mine, like dancing points of fire---Oh! the task defied me! The task I say--it was a duty, I'll swear now, in the experience of later years.

I kissed her first on the night before M'Iver set out on his travels anew, no more in the camp of Argile his severed chief, but as a Cavalier of the purchased sword.

It was a night of exceeding calm, with the moon, that I had seen as a corn-hook over my warfare with MacLachlan in Tarra-dubh, swollen to the full and gleaming upon the country till it shone as in the dawn of day.

We walked back and forth on the hunting-road, for long in a silence broken by few words. My mind was in a storm. I felt that I was losing my friend, and that, by itself, was trouble; but I felt, likewise, a shame that the pa.s.sion of love at my bosom robbed the deprivation of much of its sorrow.

"I shall kiss her to-night if she spurns me for ever," I said to myself over and over again, and anon I would marvel at my own daring; but the act was still to do. It was more than to do--it was to be led up to, and yet my lady kept every entrance to the project barred, with a cunning that yet astounds me.

We had talked of many things in our evening rambles in that wood, but never of M'Iver, whose name the girl shunned mention of for a cause I knew but could never set her right on. This night, his last in our midst, I ventured on his name. She said nothing for a little, and for a moment I thought, "Here's a dour, little, unforgiving heart!"

Then, softly, said she, "I wish him well and a safe return from his travelling. I wish him better than his deserts. That he goes at all surprises me. I thought it but John Splendid's promise--to be acted on or not as the mood happened."

"Yes," I said; "he goes without a doubt. I saw him to-day kiss his farewells with half-a-dozen girls on the road between the Maltland and the town."

"I daresay," she answered; "he never lacked boldness."

My chance had come.

"No, indeed, he did not," said I; "and I wish I had some of it myself."