Macleod of Dare Part 19

"You know quite well, Keith," said his cousin, "that Hamish is no more a butler than he is captain of the _Umpire_ or clerk of the accounts.

Hamish is simply everybody and everything at Castle Dare. And if you speak of Norman Ogilvie--well, I think it would be more like yourself, Keith, to consult the feelings of an old man rather than the opinions of a young one."

"You are always on the right side, Janet. Tell Hamish I am very sorry. I meant him no disrespect. And he may call me at one in the morning if he likes. He never looked on me but as a bit of his various machinery for killing things."

"That is not fair of you, Keith. Old Hamish would give his right hand to save you the scratch of a thorn."

She went off to cheer the old man, and he turned to his book. But it was not to read it; it was only to stare at the outside of it in an absent sort of way. The fact is, he had found in it the story of a young aid-de-camp who was intrusted with a message to a distant part of the field while a battle was going forward, and who in mere bravado rode across a part of the ground open to the enemy's fire. He came back laughing. He had been hit, he confessed, but he had escaped: and he carelessly shook a drop or two of blood from a flesh wound on his hand.

Suddenly, however, he turned pale, wavered a little, and then fell forward on his horse's neck, a corpse.

Macleod was thinking about this story rather gloomily. But at last he got up with a more cheerful air, and seized his cap.

"And if it is my death-wound I have got," he was thinking to himself, as he set out for the boat that was waiting for him at the sh.o.r.e, "I will not cry out too soon."

CHAPTER XIV.

A FRIEND.

His death-wound! There was but little suggestion of any death-wound about the manner or speech of this light-hearted and frank-spoken fellow who now welcomed his old friend Ogilvie ash.o.r.e. He swung the gun-case into the cart as if it had been a bit of thread. He himself would carry Ogilvie's top-coat over his arm.

"And why have you not come in your hunting tartan?" said he, observing the very precise and correct shooting costume of the young man.

"Not likely," said Mr. Ogilvie, laughing. "I don't like walking through clouds with bare knees, with a chance of sitting down on an adder or two. And I'll tell you what it is, Macleod; if the morning is wet, I will not go out stalking, if all the stags in Christendom were there. I know what it is; I have had enough of it in my younger days."

"My dear fellow," Macleod said, seriously, "you must not talk here as if you could do what you liked. It is not what you wish to do, or what you don't wish to do; it is what Hamish orders to have done. Do you think I would dare to tell Hamish what we must do to-morrow?"

"Very well, then, I will see Hamish myself; I dare say he remembers me."

And he did see Hamish that evening, and it was arranged between them that if the morning looked threatening, they would leave the deer alone, and would merely take the lower-lying moors in the immediate neighborhood of Castle Dare. Hamish took great care to impress on the young man that Macleod had not yet taken a gun in his hand, merely that there should be a decent bit of shooting when his guest arrived.

"And he will say to me, only yesterday," observed Hamish, confidentially--"it wa.s.s yesterday itself he wa.s.s saying to me, 'Hamish, when Mr. Ogilvie comes here, it will be only six days or seven days he will be able to stop, and you will try to get him two or three stags.

And, Hamish'--this is what he will say to me--'you will pay no heed to me, for I hef plenty of the shooting whatever, from the one year's end to the other year's end, and it is Mr. Ogilvie you will look after.' And you do not mind the rain, sir? It is fine warm clothes you have got on--fine woollen clothes you have, and what harm will a shower do?"

"Oh, I don't mind the rain, so long as I can keep moving--that's the fact, Hamish," replied Mr. Ogilvie; "but I don't like lying in wet heather for an hour at a stretch. And I don't care how few birds there are, there will be plenty to keep us walking. So you remember me, after all, Hamish?"

"Oh ay, sir," said Hamish, with a demure twinkle in his eye. "I mind fine the time you will fall into the water off the rock in Loch na Keal."

"There, now," exclaimed Mr. Ogilvie. "That is precisely what I don't see the fun of doing, now that I have got to man's estate, and have a wholesome fear of killing myself. Do you think I would lie down now on wet sea-weed, and get slowly soaked through with the rain for a whole hour, on the chance of a seal coming on the other side of the rock? Of course when I tried to get up I was as stiff as a stone. I could not have lifted the rifle if a hundred seals had been there. And it was no wonder at all I slipped down into the water."

"But the sea-water," said Hamish, gravely; "there will no harm come to you of the sea-water."

"I want to have as little as possible of either sea-water or rain-water," said Mr. Ogilvie, with decision, "I believe Macleod is half an otter himself."

Hamish did not like this, but he only said, respectfully.

"I do not think Sir Keith is afraid of a shower of rain whatever."

These gloomy antic.i.p.ations were surely uncalled for; for during the whole of the past week the Western Isles had basked in uninterrupted sunlight, with blue skies over the fair blue seas, and a resinous warmth exhaling from the lonely moors. But all the same, next morning broke as if Mr. Ogilvie's forebodings were only too likely to be realized. The sea was leaden-hued and apparently still, though the booming of the Atlantic swell into the great caverns could be heard; Staffa, and Lunga, and the Dutchman were of a dismal black; the brighter colors of Ulva and Colonsay seemed coldly gray and green; and heavy banks of cloud lay along the land, running out to Ru-Treshanish. The noise of the stream rushing down through the fir-wood close to the castle seemed louder than usual, as if rain had fallen during the night. It was rather cold, too: all that Lady Macleod and Janet could say failed to raise the spirits of their guest.

But when Macleod--dressed in his homespun tartan of yellow and black--came round from the kennels with the dogs, and Hamish, and the tall red-headed lad Sandy, it appeared that they considered this to be rather a fine day than otherwise, and were eager to be off.

"Come along, Ogilvie." Macleod cried, as he gave his friend's gun to Sandy, but shouldered his own. "Sorry we haven't a dog-cart to drive you to the moor, but it is not far off."

"I think a cigar in the library would be the best thing for a morning like this," said Ogilvie, rather gloomily, as he put up the collar of his shooting-jacket, for a drop or two of rain had fallen.

"Nonsense, man! the first bird you kill will cheer you up."

Macleod was right; they had just pa.s.sed through the wood of young larches close to Castle Dare, and were ascending a rough stone road that led by the side of a deep glen, when a sudden whir close by them startled the silence of this gloomy morning. In an instant Macleod had whipped his gun from his shoulder and thrust it into Ogilvie's hands. By the time the young man had full-c.o.c.ked the right barrel and taken a quick aim, the bird was half way across the valley; but all the same he fired. For another second the bird continued its flight, but in a slightly irregular fashion; then down it went like a stone into the heather on the opposite side of the chasm.

"Well done, sir!" cried old Hamish.

"Bravo!" called out Macleod.

"It was a grand long shot!" said Sandy, as he unslipped the sagacious old retriever, and sent her down into the glen.

They had scarcely spoken when another dark object, looking to the startled eye as if it were the size of a house, sprang from the heather close by, and went off like an arrow, uttering a succession of sharp crowings. Why did not he fire? Then they saw him in wild despair whip down the gun, full-c.o.c.k the left barrel, and put it up again. The bird was just disappearing over a crest of rising ground, and as Ogilvie fired he disappeared altogether.

"He's down, sir!" cried Hamish, in great excitement.

"I don't think so," Ogilvie answered, with a doubtful air on his face, but with a bright gladness in his eyes all the same.

"He's down, sir," Hamish rea.s.serted. "Come away Sandy, with the dog!" he shouted to the red-headed lad, who had gone down into the glen to help Nell in her researches. By this time they saw that Sandy was recrossing the burn with the grouse in his hand, Nell following him contentedly.

They whistled, and again whistled; but Nell considered that her task had been accomplished, and alternately looked at them and up at her immediate master. However, the tall lad, probably considering that the whistling was meant as much for him as for the retriever, sprang up the side of the glen in a miraculous fashion, catching here and there by a bunch of heather or the stump of a young larch, and presently he had rejoined the party.

"Take time, sir," said he. "Take time. Maybe there is more of them about here. And the other one, I marked him down from the other side. We will get him ferry well."

They found nothing, however, until they had got to the other side of the hill, where Nell speedily made herself mistress of the other bird--a fine young c.o.c.k grouse, plump and in splendid plumage.

"And what do you think of the morning now, Ogilvie?" Macleod asked.

"Oh, I dare say it will clear," said he, shyly; and he endeavored to make light of Hamish's a.s.sertions that they were "ferry pretty shots--ferry good shots; and it was always a right thing to put cartridges in the barrels at the door of a house, for no one could tell what might be close to the house; and he was sure that Mr. Ogilvie had not forgotten the use of a gun since he went away from the hills to live in England."

"But look here, Macleod," Mr. Ogilvie said; "why did not you fire yourself?"--he was very properly surprised; for the most generous and self-denying of men are apt to claim their rights when a grouse gets up to their side.

"Oh," said Macleod simply, "I wanted you to have a shot."

And indeed all through the day he was obviously far more concerned about Ogilvie's shooting than his own. He took all the hardest work on himself--taking the outside beat, for example, if there was a bit of unpromising ground to be got over. When one or other of the dogs suddenly showed by its uplifted fore-paw, its rigid tail, and its slow, cautious, timid look round for help and encouragement, that there was something ahead of more importance than a lark, Macleod would run all the risks of waiting to give Ogilvie time to come up. If a hare ran across with any chance of coming within shot of Ogilvie, Macleod let her go by unscathed. And the young gentleman from the South knew enough about shooting to understand how he was being favored both by his host and--what was a more unlikely thing--by Hamish.

He was shooting very well, too; and his spirits rose and rose until the lowering day was forgotten altogether.

"We are in for a soaker this time!" he cried, quite cheerfully, looking around at one moment.

All this lonely world of olive greens and browns had grown strangely dark. Even the hum of flies--the only sound audible in these high solitudes away from the sea--seemed stilled; and a cold wind began to blow over from Ben-an-Sloich. The plain of the valley in front of them began to fade from view; then they found themselves enveloped in a clammy fog, that settled on their clothes and hung about their eyelids and beard, while water began to run down the barrels of their guns. The wind blew harder and harder: presently they seemed to spring out of the darkness; and, turning, they found that the cloud had swept onward toward the sea, leaving the rocks on the nearest hillside all glittering wet in the brief burst of sunlight. It was but a glimmer. Heavier clouds came sweeping over; downright rain began to pour. But Ogilvie kept manfully to his work. He climbed over the stone walls, gripping on with his wet hands. He splashed through the boggy land, paying no attention to his footsteps. And at last he got to following Macleod's plan of crossing a burn, which was merely to wade through the foaming brown water instead of looking out for big stones. By this time the letters in his breast pocket were a ma.s.s of pulp.

"Look here, Macleod," said he, with the rain running down his face, "I can't tell the difference between one bird and another. If I shoot a partridge it isn't my fault."